"...the transmitter was emitting the carrier pattern of a functioning receiver: the 'resonance' or 'awareness' effect which beat the inverse-square law, a development of Einstein's great truth that the entire cosmos is shaped by what momentarily happens to each of its material parts." (p. 124)
"'...a positron in motion through a crystal lattice is accompanied by de Broglie waves which are transforms of the waves of an electron in motion somewhere else in the universe. Thus if we control the frequency and path of the positron, we control the placement of the electron - we cause it to appear, so to speak, in the circuits of a communicator elsewhere. After that, reception is just a matter of amplifying the bursts and reading the signal.'"
-James Blish, The Quincunx Of Time (New York, 1983), CHAPTER SIX, p. 59.
Firmly grounded in physics, Anderson's characters use resonance for interstellar teleportation and Blish's use it for instantaneous communication.
5 comments:
Kaor, Paul!
Anderson manages to make even something as implausible as interstellar teleportation of matter at least SEEM possible. THE ENEMY STARS is classic hard science fiction of the kind I admire most. And I've finished rereading THE BYWORLDER, so that is the next book I will reread.
It would be great if a physicist or engineer could comment here about teleportation of matter and explain why it is or is not likely. And I lean, somewhat regretfully, to the latter view.
Sean
Labor, Sean!
I don’t qualify as a physicist or engineer despite some background, but I regard the teleportation of matter as highly unlikely. I don’t see any plausible mechanism by which it could be done, and instantaneous teleportation, as is seen in THE ENEMY STARS, would be incompatible with relativity. One can talk about quantum weirdness, and ask whether just maybe — My answer, briefly, would be that just because quantum mechanics is weird does not mean that every weirdness is made possible by quantum mechanics. The future might yet prove me wrong, but I see no prospect of just how that could plausibly happen.
Best Regards,
Nicholas D. Rosen, B.S., M.S., Ph.D.
Kaor, Nicholas!
Not sure what you meant by "Labor"!
What you said about the sheer implausibility of the instantaneous, at interstellar distances, teleportation of matter not fitting in with the current understanding of relativity is exactly what I had in mind. And that almost certainly explains why we see Poul Anderson using that idea in only one novel, THE ENEMY STARS, and two short stories.
And your credentials are impressive!
Regards! Sean
Kaor, Sean!
I meant “Kaor,” but probably hit the wrong key, and was almost surely autocorrected. Hence, “Labor.”
Best Regards,
Nicholas
P.S. I have a B.A., not a B.S. I can only blame myself for that one.
Kaor, Nicholas!
"Labor" was a typo, got it!
And I thought the "B.S" meant "Bachelor of Science," not the well known vulgarism! (Smiles)
Instead of using "BS," I sometimes just say "Bull twaddle"! (Smiles)
Sean
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