Re: [Phys-l] Star Trek

["John Clement" <clement@hal-pc.org>]

Now if you had a transporter how could you tell?  If you ask the newly
transported person they will have all the memories from before transport and
they will tell you that they are the same person.

I think we are quite safe from needing to answer that question.  I did
mention an SF story where teleportation was achieved by replicating the
original individual, and destroying the original.  Clearly in that story the
original person died and the transported person was a clone.  The transport
company kept the truth from the public, until a disgusted operator awakened
the original after he had been transported.

And of course there are the stories where the brain pattern is put inside a
computer.  The same question arises.

So we may have to be content to ask questions like what happened to the
momentum, where we can make up plausible answers.

The ability to look at a physical or mathematical situation and ask what if
questions is probably what divides successful students who build
understanding from ones who don't.  Lawson has shown that this is probably
the basis of most higher level thinking.  He has even shown that inductive
thinking is probably just a form of hypothetico-deductive thinking.  This
shows up in the physics gain.  The Startrek speculations are just a way of
playing using HD reasoning.  Any student who asks this type of question is
displaying the ability to ask HD questions.  It is very hard to convince
students that they must do this type of reasoning themselves.

John M. Clement
Houston, TX

> We ask whether momentum is conserved, but another (and possibly more
> important) question is whether humanity is conserved: are you the
> same person after transport as before?