"Niven, Larry - The Theory And Practice Of Teleportation" - читать интересную книгу автора (Niven Larry)

I don't believe in psychic teleportation. But I could be wrong. So:
We will assume that it is possible for nearly anyone to learn to teleport A new learning technique has been developed. It may be serving DNA or RNA molecules in one's food, tailoring them to carry a superficial memory directly to the brain, as we now feed flatworms to each other to transfer learned responses. It may be something else. What do you get, when nearly everyone on Earth can teleport?
You get Alfred Bester's THE STARS MY DESTINATION. I offer the book as a text to accompany this course. I'll name a few highlights:
Thieves, uncatchable or nearly so, who teleport around the world to follow the night. They never see sunlight.
Locked doors, and behind the doors, mazes complex enough to confuse anyone who might try to teleport inside. Otherwise there would be no private property, nor privacy either.
Transport vehicles become obsolete. Collectors collect them as period pieces.
Classification of each citizen's teleport characteristics. (Bester assumes a distance limit. My own question: is the limit due to relativistic uncertainty? The more distant is one's destination, the less certain is its location in space and time.)
Intensive, probably productive research into other psi powers (since one has been shown to exist).
I object to one thread of Bester's tapestry. If Gully Foyle tries to "jaunt" along a "geodesic curve" he will end by going slower than light. That's how geodesics work in Einsteinian space. But it doesn't affect the pattern of Bester's society, which is worth studying.

THEORY OF MECHANICAL TELEPORTATION: Anyone know anything about tunnel diodes?
The field is full of good writers named Smith. One wrote a story using a teleportation system based on the tunnel diode effect. Apparently physics students are now taught that a tunnel diode takes an electron here and puts it there without allowing it to occupy the intervening space. If you can do it with quantum physics, why not with larger masses? With people? The theory looks good, and it hasn't been used much in science fiction.
Older, more often used, and more traditional is the beaming method. You convert your passenger and/or cargo to electromagnetic waves, fire the beam across space, catch it in a receiver and convert the electromagnetic energy back into matter.
A modification is Poul Anderson's system in THE ENEMY STARS. Poul's system records the position and energy state of every subatomic particle in the passenger's body. A side effect is that the body is vaporized, so that one winds up with a complete record of the passenger plus a cloud of superheated plasma. The gas is sucked down through a grid, into a matter reserve, to await the next incoming signal.
The record of the passenger is fired across space. A receiver picks it up and uses it, plus the plasma in its own matter reserve, to reconstruct the passenger.
I don't know. I wouldn't ride in one of the goddamned things.
The engineering problems seem trivial compared to the legal, ethical, and philosophical ramifications. Still, what happens if the signal gets snarled up? In the good old days I read of the possibilities in EC comic books; and the pictures were vivid and horrifying. In practice, the least bit of interference would leave the passenger an idiot or a good imitation of a corpse. Over interplanetary distances you'd have to worry not only about intervening dust and gas, but about red and violet shifts due to gravity and relative velocities. And what happens to your soul?
I worry about that. I don't necessarily believe in a soul; I don't believe in taking chances. If my soul isn't recorded somewhere in the process, I'm dead, even though my memory remains as reconstructed electron tracks.
Where society is concerned, there are equally serious problems.
Let's say we've reached step. one. We've recorded our customer and we now have a record and a ball of ionised plasma. Why not beam the record to two receivers? Now we've got a duplicator. The legalities get sticky. We could get around them by permitting one, say, one Isaac Asimov to a planet; but who gets the royalties on the FOUNDATION trilogy?
Similarly, you can keep the record. You fire the signal at the receiver, but you store the tape. Ten years later the passenger walks in front of a bus. You can recreate him from tape, minus ten years of his life. But-aside from questions concerning his soul-can he collect his own life insurance?
Suppose we change our mind after step one. We store the tape instead of firing it. Is it kidnapping? Or, in view of the fact that we have mortally vaporized a man, is it murder? Does it cease to be murder if we reconstitute him before the trial?
Finally, we assume an advance whereby we needn't destroy the model to get the record. Shouldn't we destroy him anyway? Otherwise he hasn't gone anywhere.
Our fourth method doesn't have these difficulties. It is often called tranposition or teletransposition, but that's too much work. Henceforth I'll call it teleportation. It involves making two points in space contiguous . . . somehow. Generally we take advantage of the fact that the universe, as viewed from four or more dimensions, resembles a crumpled handkerchief.
Light follows the contours of the handkerchief, so that spaces which are really contiguous in four or more dimensions do not look contiguous when viewed across apparently fiat space.
If the universe does not in fact resemble a crumpled handkerchief, maybe we can make it resemble a crumpled handkerchief. It may be possible to bend the fabric of space by the judicious application of electromagnetic fields, until two points touch. At least we get no embarrassing duplication of passengers.
The embarrassment arises if two sets of machines are in operation at once, anywhere in the universe. At best, space will be bent in some unanticipated way, and nobody will get where he wants to go. At worst, the fabric of space comes apart like a too-often crumpled handkerchief.

DEVELOPMENT OF MECHANICAL TELEPORTATION:
Assume we have a teleportation transmitter and receiver. How we got these is a matter for science fiction; but once we have them we can move onto surer ground.
We assume that the principle does not involve beaming; it may involve tunnel diode effects or space-bending or something new.
So we've got two enclosed booths. Why booths?
Because of an old principle that two bodies cannot occupy the same space at the same time. Like a lot of old principles, this one isn't strictly true. Matter is mostly empty space. There is no reason why you can't teleport into a rock; there's plenty of room for your atoms and the rock's atoms. Trouble is, it'll kill you.
Teleporting into a mass of air will kill you too. There are energy factors involved, and also bends, embolisms, etc. Probably there will be an explosion.
So you need booths. Naturally the interior spaces are identical in size and shape. The transmitter booth includes air as well as the passenger or cargo. The receiver is evacuated. We teleport the air as well as the passenger and/or cargo.
If what we have are transceivers, we need not evacuate the receiver. We teleport its air to the transmitter as we teleport the cargo to the receiver.
With development, we may be able to do away with the booths. If we expand a spherical force field from a point (GREE stories, from Galaxy) to get a vacuum for the receiver, we need only a transmitter booth. Put the passenger in a pressure suit and we eliminate that booth; it doesn't matter how big a volume gets sent along as long as the volume of the receiver is bigger.
But- we'll have to start with booths.
Now turn to Figure 1 (page 92).



Booths A and B are used for the first stages of experiment, to find out if we can teleport reliably.
Once they are working well we move to step II: teleporting instruments from booth C to B and (if transceivers) back again. If conservation of energy holds, we expect a rise in temperature from teleporting down that cliff.
Booth D is built on railroad tracks. We set it moving to determine if conservation of momentum holds. Given relativity, we might as well use booth D as receiver only. Thus we can pad the back wall, in case conservation does hold.
Booths E and F test for continuous teleportation. Bullets are fired into the opening in E at various speeds. Which bullet will reach F before it strikes the back wall of E? This system could stand redesigning. Obviously we can't pad the back wall of E; we'd only teleport the padding to F. Thus we destroy a teleport booth every time the bullet hits the back wall of E. When the bullet teleports in time, it zings out of booth F and hits the scientist. If the scientist ducks, the coward, the bullet will still destroy booth B.
We can get better data with a long crossbow bolt, by measuring what length of the bolt gets teleported in time. But we destroy the booth with the arrowhead and clonk the scientist with the feathered end. I'm sure there's a better way to design this system.

PRACTICE OF MECHANICAL TELEPORTATION:
Here my theme becomes complex. I intend to demonstrate that any limitations we assume for our teleportation system are going to imply a society: one society for each set of limitations. Again, I will quote my sources where I can remember them, sometimes. But much of what follows is my own.