When you put the building blocks in exactly the same spots, and exactly the same way around as they were before, then you will have the same thing, and not a copy.

See.. here is where I disagree.

Once you take apart the original, even if you take the original pieces of the original and make an exact copy of it.. it is still a replica.

Now, others could use the "jigsaw puzzle" approach: "If I put together a jigsaw puzzle, then take it apart and put it together again, is it the same puzzle?" Speaking hypothetically, which is all this entire thread is to be honest.. I would say you're not looking at something simple like putting together and taking apart a puzzle, and that the analogy, though effective, doesn't stand against the "Legos" approach. Apart from that, jigsaws were meant and developed specifically to be taken apart and put together. One cannot say the same thing about human beings.

Once something is built, it is static. If I were to then take that thing apart, even if I were to remake it from the same parts.. it is a different thing. A recreation of the original. The original thing was destroyed when it was taken apart, and can never be the same again.

If your house were destroyed in a storm, but they gathered all the lumber and boards and everything to remake it (and for sake of argument we will say that every single piece used was a part of the original and everything is exactly as it was before)... would you still look at that as the same house as before?

In your mind, you would know it is not the original house. That house was destroyed. It would look the same, feel the same, appear the same... but it is still not the same.


Gandalf

Yep.

Well.. that would be a mighty nifty storm, to not destroy the parts, but yeah, it would be the same house.

Over here homes are moved that way at times. Granted, the plaster and wallpaper will not be the exact same, that I do have to give you, but it WOULD feel to me as the same house. In that case the emotional value of a place is involved as well.

You say that I oppose your speculations with my speculations and you are entirely true, I don't think I ever claimed I "know" stuff, however when I contradicted you I think I did it beacause what you said was without backup. You basically said "I know it doesn't work, because this, this and that" I said, "I don't know if it works or not, but your "this, this and that" arguments are fishy because either are not related or you (we) don't understand them, I never claimed that I do understand them, but I think I have the right to be skeptical about things that don't have proof or seem to contradict the proofs that we have. If I came up as supporting something that's impossible I'm sorry but I just wanted to correct or understand some of your arguments.

I take that second quote as you saying, "Quantum process doesn't work this way. You can't do it. Things behave in a different way at that level." Ergo, I can take that statement as a proclamation of something you "know" to be true. Do I take this out of context? I have never heard of science verifying that atoms mysteriously disappear and reappear places without reason. Electrons jump from place to place based on charge.. but they don't just vanish. The same electron jumps from one atom and moves to another.


As for the argument, I would have to say to accept that we disagree. We can run around this concept until the end of time, because there is no absolute science to prove or disprove either position. To my mind, taking something and destroying it then building it somewhere else, I have a duplicate of the original thing in a different place. Something exists only once. Once it is destroyed, it can be imitated, but never truly recreated.

If someone were standing next to me and they did this teleportation thing, I couldn't look at them as the same person when they came through on the other side. They are a replica.. something that was made from the person to appear as the person.. but it still isn't the same person.

Just like this old building in my hometown... it's been there since the mid 1900's. If it were torn down and rebuilt... I would still have to acknowledge that the building had been destroyed, and that the new building is just not the same. I would view it as a copy, and not as the "first of its kind".

So, what say we call this one a draw.. with no winning argument, and move on to other topics? There's no way I can "prove" that something destroyed and recreated is different, and there's no way to "prove" that it is the same. Was a good little debate... though I have to agree with Adrian about debating over an argument that can only be hypothesized about. :/


Gandalf

Oh, but there are things that I do know and they are common knowledge.... Just correct me where I'm wrong, if I am.

Jump = vanish from one place and appear in another.

According to the way I was taught about this process in Physics, this is not true.


If one atom of a positive charge passes near another atom of a negative charge, they seek to become neutral again by "balancing" themselves. The electron doesn't mystically vanish from one atom and appear on the other atom... it literally detaches from the negatively charged atom, crosses actual space, and is naturally drawn to the positively charged atom (much like a positve and negative charged magnet), where it re-establishes itself in an orbit to give both atoms a neutral charge.

There is no "vanishing". It crosses space naturally. For want of a better term, it "takes the bus" from one atom to the other.

Either that, or my Physics teacher was on crack.


Gandalf

What about dual-slot experiment when one photon passes at the same time through two slots?

I don't know. Give me a link to follow so I can check it out?

Without looking at the article first, I'd have to say it is probably related to the speed at which the particle travels.


photon:

–noun: a quantum of electromagnetic radiation, usually considered as an elementary particle that is its own antiparticle and that has zero rest mass and charge and a spin of one. Symbol: γ

Also called light quantum.


light:

2. Physics. a. Also called luminous energy, radiant energy. electromagnetic radiation to which the organs of sight react, ranging in wavelength from about 400 to 700 nm and propagated at a speed of 186,282 mi./sec (299,972 km/sec), considered variously as a wave, corpuscular, or quantum phenomenon.


Given the similarity of the definitions, one could hypothesize that a "photon" is similar to that which we call "light", only that it operates in wavelengths that are not visible to the human eye. We can therefore extrapolate that a "photon" would travel in speeds similar to that of light, which would be 186,282 mi./sec (299,972 km/sec), as defined.

Now, that speed is fast enough to encircle the entire globe 7.5 times in one second. It would take a very precise method in order to determine that it actually disappeared from one place and reappeared in another rather than simply having zipped through that same space in some unknown fraction of a second.


Still, I'd like to see the article, if you can find me something.


Gandalf

I meant "double-slit experiment". Read here ...and some interpretations.

And of course, Schrödinger's cat

Hope this shows at least that things at that level are not necessarily in full concordance with common sense.

That was an interesting read... I followed some other links provided in order to get some more information. I could bring my own interpretations, but I am in no means as practiced as these other scientists, so I don't think my answers could be taken as seriously as theirs.

This experiment doesn't really address with the concept of taking something apart, moving it, and putting it back together, as this teleportation process seems to use. It is more along the lines of having one thing exist in two different places at the same time. Of course, this is in defiance of the truism that "something can not be in two places at once".

Schrodinger's Cat defeats the interpretation you linked to, so... yeah.


This gets into wave-particle duality, which was the founding point for modern quantum mechanics. This says that all particles (and therefore all matter) displays characterstics of both particles and waves. However, it also says that this kind of similarity can only be detected at atomic or sub-atomic level, so it cannot be seen in a boulder or a tree or the like.

I'm sure there's an answer to explain it out there. We just don't have the means to find it at the moment. I don't believe this proves that things operate outside of common sense, either. It certainly baffles people, yes... but we can't with certainty prove that these particles are actually existing in two locations at the same time. I also don't believe this would necessarily address the issues with "teleportation", since it is dealing with a different quantum phenomenon than that which teleportation would have to exploit.

Unless, of course, they find a way to supercharge a person to the point that they exhibit wave-particle duality, at which point said person could theoretically exist in two places at the same time. The issue with that is, like the double-slit experiment.. the actual location the particle is going to hit the detector is not predictable. It always makes the same pattern, but always in a random fashion. This leaves a large body of uncertainty as to "where" the person will end up at the end of this process, if at all.


Gandalf

Yeah, I didn't mean to show that as supporting the teleporting stuff, only that things are inherently strange (from the perspective of common sense) at quantum level (which I think virtually everybody agrees upon)