The SCIENCE & TECHNOLOGY News Thread

[MrTerrorist]

Robert Heinlein’s predictions for the Year 2000 (from 1952)

So let's have a few free-swinging predictions about the future. Some will be wrong - but cautious predictions are sure to be wrong.

1. Interplanetary travel is waiting at your front door — C.O.D. It's yours when you pay for it.

2. Contraception and control of disease is revising relations between the sexes to an extent that will change our entire social and economic structure.

3. The most important military fact of this century is that there is no way to repel an attack from outer space.

4. It is utterly impossible that the United States will start a "preventive war." We will fight when attacked, either directly or in a territory we have guaranteed to defend.

5. In fifteen years the housing shortage will be solved by a "breakthrough" into new technologies which will make every house now standing as obsolete as privies.

6. We'll all be getting a little hungry by and by.

7. The cult of the phony in art will disappear. So-called "modern art" will be discussed only by psychiatrists.

8. Freud will be classed as a pre-scientific, intuitive pioneer and psychoanalysis will be replaced by a growing, changing "operational psychology" based on measurement and prediction.

9. Cancer, the common cold, and tooth decay will all be conquered; the revolutionary new problem in medical research will be to accomplish "regeneration," i.e., to enable a man to grow a new leg, rather than fit him with an artificial limb.

10. By the end of this century mankind will have explored this solar system, and the first ship intended to reach the nearest star will be a-building.

11. Your personal telephone will be small enough to carry in your handbag. Your house telephone will record messages, answer simple inquiries, and transmit vision.

12. Intelligent life will be found on Mars.

13. A thousand miles an hour at a cent a mile will be commonplace; short hauls will be made in evacuated subways at extreme speed.

14. A major objective of applied physics will be to control gravity.

15. We will not achieve a "World State" in the predictable future. Nevertheless, Communism will vanish from this planet.

16. Increasing mobility will disenfranchise a majority of the population. About 1990 a constitutional amendment will do away with state lines while retaining the semblance.

17. All aircraft will be controlled by a giant radar net run on a continent-wide basis by a multiple electronic "brain."

18. Fish and yeast will become our principal sources of proteins. Beef will be a luxury; lamb and mutton will disappear.

19. Mankind will not destroy itself, nor will "Civilization" be destroyed.

Here are things we won't get soon, if ever:

— Travel through time
— Travel faster than the speed of light
— "Radio" transmission of matter.
— Manlike robots with manlike reactions
— Laboratory creation of life
— Real understanding of what "thought" is and how it is related to matter.
— Scientific proof of personal survival after death.
— Nor a permanent end to war.

[C.A.]

Looks like he's almost completely wrong lol, and has no idea what art is about.

Even what he thinks is impossible has the first steps achieved.

Astronauts are technically time traveling into the future since at their extreme velocity, they are ahead of us in time in minuscule amounts. And neutrinos seem to be traveling faster than speed of light.

'Radio matter' refers to teleportation, which means quantum entanglement:
http://www.livescience.com/7647-tele...-achieved.html

Creating life in the lab:
http://www.npr.org/templates/story/s...ryId=127010591

Originally Posted by Ithekro

Makes you wonder what the Imperial Japanese Army would be using if they were still around with the fasination with mecha.


The first one is definately not All Terrain, the legs don't raise at all.

The RX-03 doesn't seem to raise its body very high off the ground, so it isn't all that All Terrain either.

These things need some really good balance or compensators to be any better than wheeled trucks or tracked tanks. That or follow the AS system and hope to can build something that can move like a human and be controlled by a human from the inside...and hope you can train those operators to feel the balance so the things doesn't "fall down and can't get up".

The artificial muscles used by AS are definitely possible and on its way:

http://www.nature.com/news/2009/0903....2009.178.html

The inventors of Carbon Nanotubes really deserved the 2010 Nobel Prize in physics, its the most amazing material ever created. Aerogel, metamaterials, nanotechology, its an exciting era to live in.

[Anh_Minh]

Originally Posted by C.A.

Looks like he's almost completely wrong lol, and has no idea what art is about.

Even what he thinks is impossible has the first steps achieved.

Astronauts are technically time traveling into the future since at their extreme velocity, they are ahead of us in time in minuscule amounts. And neutrinos seem to be traveling faster than speed of light.

That's not what people mean by time travel and you know it. Unless you happen to be made of neutrinos, thus begging the question of how you manage to type on a keyboard to make posts on a forum.

'Radio matter' refers to teleportation, which means quantum entanglement:
http://www.livescience.com/7647-tele...-achieved.html

That's teleporting information. You still have to carry the matter used to encode said information by conventional means. We're not anywhere close to teleporting matter.

Creating life in the lab:
http://www.npr.org/templates/story/s...ryId=127010591

Depends on what you mean by "creating life", but yes, he was probably wrong on that one.

Depending on what he meant, he was probably also wrong on the manlike robots and maybe the understanding of thought.

He did get a few things right (or half-right) in the numbered ones, and I wish 7 had been one of them...

[C.A.]

Originally Posted by Anh_Minh

That's not what people mean by time travel and you know it. Unless you happen to be made of neutrinos, thus begging the question of how you manage to type on a keyboard to make posts on a forum.

That's teleporting information. You still have to carry the matter used to encode said information by conventional means. We're not anywhere close to teleporting matter.

He did get a few things right (or half-right) in the numbered ones, and I wish 7 had been one of them...

Well I did say the first steps. Einstein himself stated that high sublight velocities itself is a form of time travel and is now considered to be a possible way to survive and achieve interstellar travel. To go backwards in time, current only Dr. Ronald Mallet seems to be working on it, his time machine was last heard in 2007, not sure what's his progress now.

Real teleportation mechanics is very different from fictional teleportation, because it is easier to duplicate matter over distance than to bring the matter itself over distance.

The scientists who conducted the experiment have also said this: if human teleportation were to be achieved one day, what are the moral implications? The person being teleported in a traditional sci fi method would literally be broken down and killed, to have a clone of him recreated somewhere else. Would someone gladly volunteer himself to such an experiment?

Quantum entanglement is the real world scientific way for teleportation, the scientists are slowly moving on to bigger particles for their experiments, protons to whole atoms and then bucky balls.

Modern art is literally everything and everywhere, the most common modern medium for art now is the the screen. Film, video art, computer games, etc. these are all modern art, can these modern art be completely gone and be discussed only by psychiatrists?

As an artist, I feel like talk about it more, but this is a technology thread. But then of course, maybe I could talk about Medium is the Message, since its directly related to the video Endless Soul posted on the previous page. That is an example of a contemporary art using a modern medium. The media of art has always been related to technology, from cave men using spit, blood and oil, to paint brushes, pencils, film cameras, digital cameras, computers etc.

Phony art? That is an entirely different subject and definitely doesn't belong to this thread, could he be referring to art that's lacking content or art that's expressed poorly? Or could it be because of Dadaism and the infamous Fountain? I'll stop here for now.

[Anh_Minh]

Originally Posted by C.A.

Well I did say the first steps. Einstein himself stated that high sublight velocities itself is a form of time travel and is now considered to be a possible way to survive and achieve interstellar travel. To go backwards in time, current only Dr. Ronald Mallet seems to be working on it, his time machine was last heard in 2007, not sure what's his progress now.

If you leave Earth for a year and come back a century later, I can see how that could be described as a form of time travel. If you leave Earth for a year and come back a year and an hour later, then I'll say a nap will provide a greater distortion...

Real teleportation mechanics is very different from fictional teleportation, because it is easier to duplicate matter over distance than to bring the matter itself over distance.

The scientists who conducted the experiment have also said this: if human teleportation were to be achieved one day, what are the moral implications? The person being teleported in a traditional sci fi method would literally be broken down and killed, to have a clone of him recreated somewhere else. Would someone gladly volunteer himself to such an experiment?

Quantum entanglement is the real world scientific way for teleportation, the scientists are slowly moving on to bigger particles for their experiments, protons to whole atoms and then bucky balls.

Nevertheless. He didn't say we'd never get it, he said if it happened at all, it wouldn't be soon. And there's a far, far cry from teleporting a handful of bits to any useful form of "matter teleportation". (And what would that be? I mean, if we teleport the blueprints for a machine part, which are then used to make said part, does that qualify? If it doesn't, what about the blueprints for a whole human being, as you evoked? )

Modern art is literally everything and everywhere, the most common modern medium for art now is the the screen. Film, video art, computer games, etc. these are all modern art, can these modern art be completely gone and be discussed only by psychiatrists?

As an artist, I feel like talk about it more, but this is a technology thread. But then of course, maybe I could talk about Medium is the Message, since its directly related to the video Endless Soul posted on the previous page. That is an example of a contemporary art using a modern medium. The media of art has always been related to technology, from cave men using spit, blood and oil, to paint brushes, pencils, film cameras, digital cameras, computers etc.

Phony art? That is an entirely different subject and definitely doesn't belong to this thread, could he be referring to art that's lacking content or art that's expressed poorly? Or could it be because of Dadaism and the infamous Fountain? I'll stop here for now.

Going by context and my own prejudices, I'd hazard that his beef is with abstract paintings made of pigeon droppings and the like, not video games - which hadn't been invented yet anyway.

[C.A.]

Originally Posted by Anh_Minh

If you leave Earth for a year and come back a century later, I can see how that could be described as a form of time travel. If you leave Earth for a year and come back a year and an hour later, then I'll say a nap will provide a greater distortion...

Nevertheless. He didn't say we'd never get it, he said if it happened at all, it wouldn't be soon. And there's a far, far cry from teleporting a handful of bits to any useful form of "matter teleportation". (And what would that be? I mean, if we teleport the blueprints for a machine part, which are then used to make said part, does that qualify? If it doesn't, what about the blueprints for a whole human being, as you evoked? )

Going by context and my own prejudices, I'd hazard that his beef is with abstract paintings made of pigeon droppings and the like, not video games - which hadn't been invented yet anyway.

Well at out current technology level we can't see a practical use for time traveling forward in time, especially since there's no need. But in the future with interstellar travel, going high at a high speed will mean you age less. When considering intergalactic distances, time is no different from distance, you'd want to cover more distance and time in lesser time.

In physics, information is not 'knowledge' or 'instruction', it is the information of the state of matter, such as the spin of particles, the particle wavelength etc.

Right now scientists are able to teleport a particle by synchronising the information of two particles using quantum entanglement, effectively making the target particle the exact same particle as the template.

If scientists are able to achieve this at a molecular scale, they can create a duplicate mass, effectively 'teleporting' mass, matter over a distance. This technology is killing two birds with one stone actually, teleportation and duplication. Lets say you have a storage of atoms, you can entangle those atoms to become what you want to duplicate.

Abstract art is quite a nuisance in art actually, but the general audience and the artist may see different things as abstract. Sometimes there are some artists who are too indulgent, they make things that nobody can understand but themselves, especially if expressed poorly. And then there are those that are just there to make something that looks interesting but really doesn't carry any content. Fine art, modern art, abstract art, they all have mean differently. But still abstract art is not a bad thing, there are really awe inspiring pieces of abstract art.

Art does affect science as well, like Daniel Shechtman, the 2011 Chemistry Nobel Prize winner. His discovery of quasicrystals was because he got the idea from the patterns of elaborate embroidered tapestry. He was ridiculed for thinking that crystals could have multifold symmetry above 4, when he claimed to see a 10 fold symmetry in a crystal which he figured out from the tapestry patterns.

As Aristotle said, art is the mimesis of nature, to put it very crudely, art is copying nature. Da Vinci studied nature for his art, his creations were artistic, but the observations and content were scientific. Even a film telling a story of a person, it is a mimesis of a human life, a part of nature. Aristotle Also means that nothing is original, because everything was originally inspired by nature, the first cave drawing was about the food cavemen hunted.

[Dhomochevsky]

He is kind of right on a lot of things.
The things he got wrong are mostly because of unreasonable economics. We COULD do them, but they would so expensive compared to what we are doing now, that there is really no reason to try.
And for some things that is really sad. Space exploration for example.
I don't see where the "intelligent life on Mars" line comes from though. It's not like there have ever been any hints in that direction.

The "things we won't get soon" are 100% correct by the way. And no, we don't even have any first steps in any of those. The closest may be "Laboratory creation of life", but so far no one has succeeded to animate matter. You always need some living organism as a basis. The best thing someone has done, was building a bacteria genome from scratch (though it was copied from an actual bacteria) and implanting it into an empty cell. But this is more like reprogramming existing life.

Then next up may be "Real understanding of what "thought" is and how it is related to matter.", with the recently developed technics to observe living brains in detail. You might argue some people have profound theories already, but nothing is sure yet. This is a good shot at this topic: http://www.ted.com/talks/antonio_dam...ciousness.html

Edit:
I really feel like going through all of those points now, looks like fun.

So let's have a few free-swinging predictions about the future. Some will be wrong - but cautious predictions are sure to be wrong.

1. Interplanetary travel is waiting at your front door — C.O.D. It's yours when you pay for it. Well, yes. If you pay for it. With that amount of money you could also buy a small country though.

2. Contraception and control of disease is revising relations between the sexes to an extent that will change our entire social and economic structure. I don't know that much about sexual relations in the 50s, but it seems that people are getting into sex earlier and more often now, than back then. Yes, this is mostly because of "contraception" (ie the pill).

3. The most important military fact of this century is that there is no way to repel an attack from outer space. In a way, yes. There is currently no way to fend of intercontinental ballistic missiles. These things don't got into outer space, but they do reach extreme heights and then drop back down (ballistic) at high speeds, being almost undetectable in this state. The effect is the same. The US has it's missile shield plans, but they don't seem to be very successful.

4. It is utterly impossible that the United States will start a "preventive war." We will fight when attacked, either directly or in a territory we have guaranteed to defend. Haha, no. They do it all the time.

5. In fifteen years the housing shortage will be solved by a "breakthrough" into new technologies which will make every house now standing as obsolete as privies. What housing shortage? Must have been some recent phenomen in the 50s. Owning a house still expensive, but you might argue that the recent real estate bubble burst and following price drops have archieved this in a way.

6. We'll all be getting a little hungry by and by. I don't get this one. Does he mean food shortages? Well, in certain places of the worls this is true. Just not in the western world.

7. The cult of the phony in art will disappear. So-called "modern art" will be discussed only by psychiatrists. Again.. what? Obviously the modern art of the 50s is not modern any more. People are now doing other things mostly. Duh.

8. Freud will be classed as a pre-scientific, intuitive pioneer and psychoanalysis will be replaced by a growing, changing "operational psychology" based on measurement and prediction. As far as I can tell, Freud is not really considered that great of a scientist by todays specialists. He is right on the psychology based on measurements though. We have developed amazing tools for that in the last years.

9. Cancer, the common cold, and tooth decay will all be conquered; the revolutionary new problem in medical research will be to accomplish "regeneration," i.e., to enable a man to grow a new leg, rather than fit him with an artificial limb. Working on it... not quite there yet. Regeneration is what stem cell research is all about. So yes, we're working on that too.

10. By the end of this century mankind will have explored this solar system, and the first ship intended to reach the nearest star will be a-building. No moneyz.

11. Your personal telephone will be small enough to carry in your handbag. Your house telephone will record messages, answer simple inquiries, and transmit vision. Check.

12. Intelligent life will be found on Mars. ...why not somehwere else? What is this one based on? Anyway: Nope.

13. A thousand miles an hour at a cent a mile will be commonplace; short hauls will be made in evacuated subways at extreme speed. Too expensive to go that fast. Evacuating whole subways would cost an enormous sum. A cent a mile? How much do budget flights cost? If you account for inflation of the $ since the 50s, this might well be true.

14. A major objective of applied theoretic physics will be to control understand gravity.

15. We will not achieve a "World State" in the predictable future. Nevertheless, Communism will vanish from this planet. True, but was it ever really there to begin with?

16. Increasing mobility will disenfranchise a majority of the population. About 1990 a constitutional amendment will do away with state lines while retaining the semblance. Yes, people in the western world are much more mobile than before. State lines did not disapear, but for example in the EU we have eliminated state lines for the individual, meaning you can travel, live and work wherever you want without restrictions. Hasn't spread to the rest of the world yet.

17. All aircraft will be controlled by a giant radar net run on a continent-wide basis by a multiple electronic "brain." Not directly controlled, but yes, planes are mostly directed by flight control. Pilots are still on every plane, but this is more of a backup system, as they autopilot most of the time.

18. Fish and yeast will become our principal sources of proteins. Beef will be a luxury; lamb and mutton will disappear. Again: not in the west, but in other parts of the world. He did not account for our agressive defense of wealthy lifestyle.

19. Mankind will not destroy itself, nor will "Civilization" be destroyed. This one is a cheat. If we had destroyed mankind or Civilization, no one would be left to call him out on being wrong.

[C.A.]

Originally Posted by Dhomochevsky

The "things we won't get soon" are 100% correct by the way. And no, we don't even have any first steps in any of those. The closest may be "Laboratory creation of life", but so far no one has succeeded to animate matter. You always need some living organism as a basis. The best thing someone has done, was building a bacteria genome from scratch (though it was copied from an actual bacteria) and implanting it into an empty cell. But this is more like reprogramming existing life.

I would like to know what do you consider first steps to those things we won't get soon?

Because as I've mentioned about, scientists have already been working on teleportation and have successfully achieved teleportation of a photon. I consider that a successful first step.

And Dr. Ronald Mallett, who's the one scientist who dedicated his whole life to time travel research, already made a time machine since 2006 and have been experimenting since. No success yet, but that's a first step to achieving time travel.

And also astronauts are all going forward in time due to high velocity and is proven because the same mathematics used to calculate their difference in time is used to calculate and adjust the same time dilations on all the satellites orbiting the planet. All those orbiting satellites are all traveling at speeds at that causes them to experience slower time relative to us people on the surface of the planet. In order to keep them in orbit and send precise information, they need constant adjustments to their clocks.

Alot of times, things thought impossible are actually possible and can be achieved, scientists have already taken first steps and have been working on them.

[Dhomochevsky]

Originally Posted by C.A.

I would like to know what do you consider first steps to those things we won't get soon?

Because as I've mentioned about, scientists have already been working on teleportation and have successfully achieved teleportation of a photon. I consider that a successful first step.

And Dr. Ronald Mallett, who's the one scientist who dedicated his whole life to time travel research, already made a time machine since 2006 and have been experimenting since. No success yet, but that's a first step to achieving time travel.

And also astronauts are all going forward in time due to high velocity and is proven because the same mathematics used to calculate their difference in time is used to calculate and adjust the same time dilations on all the satellites orbiting the planet. All those orbiting satellites are all traveling at speeds at that causes them to experience slower time relative to us people on the surface of the planet. In order to keep them in orbit and send precise information, they need constant adjustments to their clocks.

Alot of times, things thought impossible are actually possible and can be achieved, scientists have already taken first steps and have been working on them.

All of these things you mention are really just new concepts that got those old words attached to them. But they are not what was originally meant by them.

Teleportation:
Only information is being transfered here, no matter of any kind is transfered. In the case described, a photon was already exisiting in both places before the "teleportation". What they did was making that one photon a perfect copy of the other one. But the original photon was still there and "unharmed", after they lost the quantum entanglement and no new photon was created at the target destination.
If you call this teleportation, then you have just sucessfully teleported this text onto your screen too.
The original idea of teleportation transfers matter from one place to another by transforming it into energy and then back into matter.

Time Travel:
Time travel really only makes sense if you go back in time. But you can not do that by going relativistic speeds. You merely "skip" time. Actually, as you have no universal time in a relativistic universe, you can't really apply the idea of time travel to it. It is just time moving at different "speeds" in different places. But anyway, it always moves forward, never backwards.

These two are really the ones where we "know" (within our current theories) that they are in fact impossible. Some of the others are more realistic, as I said above, but I have not heard of any idea that might achieve one of them yet.

As automation is my personal field of work, I can asure you, that we are not even close to manlike robots btw. Maybe we will get the perfect illusion of one sometime soon though.

[Fahd]

Originally Posted by MrTerrorist

1. Interplanetary travel is waiting at your front door — C.O.D. It's yours when you pay for it.

Not yet, although it's likely that one of the manned space powers will have gotten humans scientists to Mars by 2100. If certainty won't be a common thing, at least while there is no economic incentive for us travel there. We're only now at the point where tourism can offset the cost of taking (moderately wealthy) people into space, and by space I mean just above the Karman line (100 km above the Earth's surface). We've got a long way to go before getting to Mars will 'only' cost $200,000 per passenger.

2. Contraception and control of disease is revising relations between the sexes to an extent that will change our entire social and economic structure.

I'm not sure disease control has anything to do with gender-equality? I would've thought education and family-friendly employment laws would be the primary equalisers between the genders.

3. The most important military fact of this century is that there is no way to repel an attack from outer space.

We don't have a space fleet, but I suppose we could throw some missiles into low Earth orbit if we had to.

5. In fifteen years the housing shortage will be solved by a "breakthrough" into new technologies which will make every house now standing as obsolete as privies.

I can't even begin to imagine what he thought we'd be living in, if not housing? High-rise flats perhaps? I suppose that's happened in urban areas, but that's not exactly a surprise given land prices in those places.

9. Cancer, the common cold, and tooth decay will all be conquered; the revolutionary new problem in medical research will be to accomplish "regeneration," i.e., to enable a man to grow a new leg, rather than fit him with an artificial limb.

Cancer is the result of environmental factors (pollution, smoking, lack of exercise, exposure to ionizing radiation, etc). I suppose we understand more about cancer now than then, but I wouldn't say we've conquered it. I don't think we've got any cure for the common cold either.

We're created organs using stem cells, and we're working on limb regeneration. It'll probably be expensive though...

10. By the end of this century mankind will have explored this solar system, and the first ship intended to reach the nearest star will be a-building.

Although no human has gotten further than the moon, we've sent probes to all the planets, rovers to Mars, and the Voyager probes are on course to exit the solar system. I don't think humans will be travelling to Proxima Centuri though.

11. Your personal telephone will be small enough to carry in your handbag. Your house telephone will record messages, answer simple inquiries, and transmit vision.

Achieved, although amusingly it's our personal telephone's (i.e. cell phones) that are the ones that can transmit video (i.e. video calls).

12. Intelligent life will be found on Mars.

Sub-surface bacteria? Maybe. But the conditions on Mars aren't favourable to large-scale life.

13. A thousand miles an hour at a cent a mile will be commonplace; short hauls will be made in evacuated subways at extreme speed.

The evacuated subway system sounds expensive to setup. Also, the distance between most subway stops would require high rates of acceleration and deceleration to achieve very fast speeds. Concorde achieved a cruising speed of ~1300 MPH, so it's certainly possible to get to 1000 MPH, but not cheaply. There are some replacements being thought about [1, 2], but I doubt the ticket prices on those will be any cheaper :/ .

14. A major objective of applied physics will be to control gravity.

How I would love for this to happen one day . Just think of the possibilities for pranks . We'd probably have to determine if the hypothetical quantized particle of gravity (the graviton) exists first, before we can think about trying to manipulate it. Even then, I suspect trying to manipulate gravity would be energy intensive, so no hand-held anti-gravity devices .

17. All aircraft will be controlled by a giant radar net run on a continent-wide basis by a multiple electronic "brain."

Not really necessary. Auto-pilot is a sufficient technology for (mostly) pilot-less flight, and centralising aircraft control to a single (radar-connected) control station means you have a single point of failure.

Here are things we won't get soon, if ever:

(1) Travel through time
(2) Travel faster than the speed of light
(3) "Radio" transmission of matter.
(4) Manlike robots with manlike reactions
(5) Laboratory creation of life
(6) Real understanding of what "thought" is and how it is related to matter.
(7) Scientific proof of personal survival after death.
(8) Nor a permanent end to war.

(1) In the same gravitational frame of reference? Correct.
(2) As long as general relativity continues to hold up, then correct again.
(3) Physically moving a particle from one place to another by teleportation? Sure. Transferring its energy states (i.e. information) is doable though.
(4) Welllll... I suppose the Sony Aibo doesn't count?
(5) Cloning existing life is about as far as we've gotten with that.
(6) Thought results in chemical reactions in the brain? I guess that's probably the closest answer we have so far?
(7) Death is outside of the frame of reference of the living. So that's pretty much right.
(8) Humans disagree (), they get cross, they fight. No surprises there :/ .

[C.A.]

Originally Posted by Dhomochevsky

All of these things you mention are really just new concepts that got those old words attached to them. But they are not what was originally meant by them.

Teleportation:
Only information is being transfered here, no matter of any kind is transfered. In the case described, a photon was already exisiting in both places before the "teleportation". What they did was making that one photon a perfect copy of the other one. But the original photon was still there and "unharmed", after they lost the quantum entanglement.
If you call this teleportation, then you have just sucessfully teleported this text onto your screen too.
The original idea of teleportation transfers matter from one place to another.

Time Travel:
Time travel really only makes sense if you go back in time. But you can not do that by going relativistic speeds. You merely "skip" time. Actually, as you have no universal time in a relativistic universe, you can't really apply that and call it "time travel". It is just time moving at different "speeds" in different places. But anyway, it always moves forward, never backwards.

These two are really the ones where we "know" (within our current theories) that they are in fact impossible. Some of the others are more realistic, as I said above, but I have not heard of any idea that might achieve one of them yet.

I think you didn't understand what quantum entanglement does, it is completely different from transferring of data in an electronic sense.

The 'old' concept of fictional teleportation is a flawed concept, in the real world, it means the killing of a person to have him rebuilt in another location. Would you want to completely unscramble and disintegrate your body to teleport to another location? If we can make a copy of you right where you wanted, would you want yourself killed in the position you were at?

Another thing about quantum entanglement is that it happens instantaneously, unlike an electronic signal which travels at the speed of an electron, it 'travels' faster than light.

Time Travel makes sense both ways, forwards or backwards. In fact the idea of time traveling to the future came first before traveling to the past. And there are no laws in physics that says going backwards in time is impossible, in fact there are many calculations and theories that says time traveling backwards is possible. To be able to test those theories is only a matter of technological advancement.

In the past hundred years, humans went from horse carriages to space travel, from thinking that flying is impossible to flying in space.

[Ithekro]

In the early 1950s, before any space travel, Mars was still the goal of many rocket scientists and those with early sci-fi dreams based on stuff written around the turn of the century. This was still the Mars that had canals as far as anyone could tell. Canals would imply civilization since it would be an artificial construction. Into the 1960s, as more space travel began and better telescopes xoomed in on Mars, the "canals" disappeared from the clearer images. By the 1970s and the Viking probes...Mars was found to be what we know it to be today. A very cold planet.

Several of these predictions seem viable in the 1950s based on the pace of advancements in the early 20th century. And up to the end of tht 1960s these things still seemed viable. Sometime in the 1970s and 1980s we seemed to have missed the boat, so to speak. The line of advancement either slowed down, or it shifted departments heavily. We have advanced in other areas than were expected in the 1950s, but not advanced in other areas that were expected based on research happening at that time, or the general sci-fi pushes happening at that time.

Going by the old ideas...we "should" be operating regularly in Earth orbit, with multiple stations, mostly for civilian use (since the UN treaties forbid war in space). But also early spaceships heading out to explore the other planets. Primative, but large ships, like the Discovery and Leonov from the films "2001" and "2010". It is almost 2012....space commerce is just starting with tourism (Virgin Galactic) and civilian operated spacecraft (Cygnus and Dragon designs) to ferry goods and eventually people to the lone orbiting space station (ISS).

[Anh_Minh]

Originally Posted by C.A.

Well at out current technology level we can't see a practical use for time traveling forward in time, especially since there's no need.

I can think of one right now: a terminally diseased patient might survive long enough for a cure to be found.

But in the future with interstellar travel, going high at a high speed will mean you age less. When considering intergalactic distances, time is no different from distance, you'd want to cover more distance and time in lesser time.

Not something that has to concern us... soon.

In physics, information is not 'knowledge' or 'instruction', it is the information of the state of matter, such as the spin of particles, the particle wavelength etc.

And in practical terms, all of that is just a means of encoding bits.

Right now scientists are able to teleport a particle by synchronising the information of two particles using quantum entanglement,

Misleading. They're teleporting a physical state, not a particle itself.

effectively making the target particle the exact same particle as the template.

Except they were pretty close to start with.

If scientists are able to achieve this at a molecular scale, they can create a duplicate mass, effectively 'teleporting' mass, matter over a distance. This technology is killing two birds with one stone actually, teleportation and duplication. Lets say you have a storage of atoms, you can entangle those atoms to become what you want to duplicate.

Uh... No. You don't create mass. What happens is that you have start with two atoms (or protons or bucky balls or whatever), and you end with two atoms. All you've gained by entangling them is that you can take one and tell what state the other's in... once.

So, yeah. No lag, but I don't know what the bandwidth's like. And, like ambassadors carrying codes in their baggage, you have to carry stuff from one point to another before you can transmit a given volume of data.

Abstract art is quite a nuisance in art actually, but the general audience and the artist may see different things as abstract. Sometimes there are some artists who are too indulgent, they make things that nobody can understand but themselves, especially if expressed poorly. And then there are those that are just there to make something that looks interesting but really doesn't carry any content. Fine art, modern art, abstract art, they all have mean differently. But still abstract art is not a bad thing, there are really awe inspiring pieces of abstract art.

Art does affect science as well, like Daniel Shechtman, the 2011 Chemistry Nobel Prize winner. His discovery of quasicrystals was because he got the idea from the patterns of elaborate embroidered tapestry. He was ridiculed for thinking that crystals could have multifold symmetry above 4, when he claimed to see a 10 fold symmetry in a crystal which he figured out from the tapestry patterns.

As Aristotle said, art is the mimesis of nature, to put it very crudely, art is copying nature. Da Vinci studied nature for his art, his creations were artistic, but the observations and content were scientific. Even a film telling a story of a person, it is a mimesis of a human life, a part of nature. Aristotle Also means that nothing is original, because everything was originally inspired by nature, the first cave drawing was about the food cavemen hunted.

And I bet his beef is that Jackson Pollock wasn't painting anything you'd see in nature, unless, haha, you had some serious psychiatric problems.

[Dhomochevsky]

Originally Posted by C.A.

I think you didn't understand what quantum entanglement does, it is completely different from transferring of data in an electronic sense.

The 'old' concept of fictional teleportation is a flawed concept, in the real world, it means the killing of a person to have him rebuilt in another location. Would you want to completely unscramble and disintegrate your body to teleport to another location? If we can make a copy of you right where you wanted, would you want yourself killed in the position you were at?

Another thing about quantum entanglement is that it happens instantaneously, unlike an electronic signal which travels at the speed of an electron, it 'travels' faster than light.

Time Travel makes sense both ways, forwards or backwards. In fact the idea of time traveling to the future came first before traveling to the past. And there are no laws in physics that says going backwards in time is impossible, in fact there are many calculations and theories that says time traveling backwards is possible. To be able to test those theories is only a matter of technological advancement.

In the past hundred years, humans went from horse carriages to space travel, from thinking that flying is impossible to flying in space.

No one really understands what quantum entanglement is. I do have a reasonable understanding of it's effects though. But I am no physics major.
I had a hard time grasping the mathematical background of quantum mechanics and we only scraped the surface of it back when I was a student.

I know what they did in that experiment, and im not disregarding it. It is an amazing feat. But it is not the teleportation Heinlein was thinking of.

The establishment of the entanglement state is not instantious as far as I know. So the "teleportation" isn't either.

Art does affect science as well, like Daniel Shechtman, the 2011 Chemistry Nobel Prize winner. His discovery of quasicrystals was because he got the idea from the patterns of elaborate embroidered tapestry. He was ridiculed for thinking that crystals could have multifold symmetry above 4, when he claimed to see a 10 fold symmetry in a crystal which he figured out from the tapestry patterns.

The man (Roger Penrose) who created those tapestrys was a mathematican though. Creating symetric, non-periodic patterns was a mathematical problem and he solved it. But I think you are right, this technique is found in art too. Middle eastern, islamic mosaics use this, if I'm not mistaken?

[Ithekro]

However, people want instant (or nearly instant) transportation. If it "kills" you at one end, but you are "alive" at the other end as a clone that to yourself feels no different than you did before being "transported"...will you actually care? (especially if one can't tell the difference on a spiritual/religious level. ie Souls)

However, having two of you around via entanglement cloning might be odd...especially if they both think themselves as "you", but the original you does not get to share the experiances of the new "you" nor remember whatever it is they do. That isn't tranportation in the sci-fi sense of the word. That is replication. What is being designed is more along the lines of a Star Trek replicator than a Star Trek Transporter....though admittedly both operated on similar principles. The end results were slightly different.

[C.A.]

Originally Posted by Anh_Minh

Uh... No. You don't create mass. What happens is that you have start with two atoms (or protons or bucky balls or whatever), and you end with two atoms. All you've gained by entangling them is that you can take one and tell what state the other's in... once.

So, yeah. No lag, but I don't know what the bandwidth's like. And, like ambassador carrying codes in their baggage, you have to carry stuff from one point to another before you can transmit a given volume of data.

And I bet his beef is that Jackson Pollock wasn't painting anything you'd see in nature, unless, haha, you had some serious psychiatric problems.

No, not creating mass, but creating as in forming a duplicate mass on the other end.

Lets say its achievable and you want to entangle this crystal of potassium chromium sulfate, you will have potassium, chromium, sulphur and oxygen on the other end. And then you start the entanglement process and all the atoms recieve the exact same information as the source crystal and all the atoms fall into place, creating a mass of the crystal.

And if we go down another level, subatomic level, lets say we want to entangle the same crystal, instead this time we have electrons, protons, neutrons and gluons. You can just entangle the crystal and all these subatomic particles will fall into place.

Pollock is always the one mentioned when it comes to abstract art. His work is an art exactly because he allowed nature to takeover, his technique involves letting his body and mind loose and letting the paint go on the canvas naturally. The flow of the paint, the dripping rate, the rate of absorption on the canvas, he controls neither of those, he just lets the paint go.

His art is in the way he completely breaks away from how art was normally done, instead of thinking and laying down the brush where it should be, he does the complete opposite. And he is so used to this state where he frees his mind that he can actually generate a natural fractal pattern on his works with equal amounts of positive and negative space throughout the canvas.

Not anyone can just throw paint anywhere and make sure theres equal amount of colour everywhere without thinking.

Originally Posted by Ithekro

The end results were slightly different.

Well one other major difference is actually the energy involved.

If complete transportation of mass from one point to another is possible, it would require infinite or near infinite amount of energy and data processing.

Quantum entanglement would require a much lesser amount of energy with instantaneous effect.

[Dhomochevsky]

I guess that makes modern art very 'geekish' in a way. Some guy experimenting and trying to find out what is possible, with a focus on the process of creation, not on the endproduct.

I can see why someone who is searching for a new painting to hang on his bedroom wall would not understand how this makes sense.

But some people just don't understand why you would go out of your way to create your own (often useless) gadgets, when you can get more refined ones on the shelves, either.

[Anh_Minh]

Originally Posted by C.A.

No, not creating mass, but creating as in forming a duplicate mass on the other end.

Lets say its achievable and you want to entangle this crystal of potassium chromium sulfate, you will have potassium, chromium, sulphur and oxygen on the other end. And then you start the entanglement process and all the atoms recieve the exact same information as the source crystal and all the atoms fall into place, creating a mass of the crystal.

And if we go down another level, subatomic level, lets say we want to entangle the same crystal, instead this time we have electrons, protons, neutrons and gluons. You can just entangle the crystal and all these subatomic particles will fall into place.

I'm not a physics major either, but I'm pretty sure that's not how entanglement works. Let's say - for simplicity's sake more than accuracy - that you have an entangled pair of Na and an entangled pair of Cl. One half of the pairs is at A, the other at B. You're at A, you want to make some table salt, so you stick the Na with the Cl. I'm pretty sure it won't make salt at B. For one thing, your manipulations to bring the Na and Cl together? Chances are it'll break the entanglement. For another, sticking two atoms together would be asking for more work than I think quantum entanglement is capable. (And what if instead of both being at B, one was at B and the other at C? Do you think they'd meet halfway?)

[Ithekro]

It would be much more satifying to have just a generic pile of protons, electrons, and nuetrons at one end (with perhaps some amount of their antimatter equivalents if needed), and the process arranges them into the atoms from the original material you want duplicated. Instead of having like kind atoms at one end just being remade into a different pattern of the same atoms, because then you would have to know what is being "sent" before hand and have the exact materials on hand. The generic method means you don't need specific atoms, just building blocks for any atomic pattern.

At least that would be ideal from a fuctional use. Practical use and energy viability is where things "fall apart" in sci-fi to reality development.

[Dhomochevsky]

Has anyone entangled different kinds of particles with each other?
Is this even possible?

As you can deduct from the photon entanglement experiment, doing that imposes the same state onto both photons making them perfect copies at the moment of measuring one of them.
But if you would entangle say a Proton with a Neutron, how should that work out? How can one ever become a copy of the other/exist in the same state, as they are fundamentally different?

The biggest entangled body we know of is the Bose–Einstein condensate. But this is formed of identical particles (bosons? They use actual gas made of atoms, but it seems to get broken down to bosons in the process... or maybe you just cant tell which boson belongs to which nucleon anymore?).
I really think we are not fit to discuss this. At least I'm not.. looking at the math: http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Bose%E2...ein_condensate

Edit:
Turns out I don't even know what bosons really are. Learn something new every day.