Just in time, the Enterprise transporter beams Star Trek’s Captain Kirk and Dr. McCoy away from the frozen asteroid Rura Penthe. It lets them escape from a hospital elevator on 20th-century Earth. It beams furry Tribbles to a Klingon warship.
Throughout hundreds of TV episodes and various movies, the transporter has dematerialized Star Trek characters and beamed them to their destinations. Why did series creator Gene Roddenberry choose teleportation as a travel device? Not for the reasons you probably think. He had limited money for special effects, and the transporter was a cheap way to get characters from the Enterprise to their destinations. So then, why don't we use real transporters? The answer lies in the laws of physics.
Beam Me Up?
Taking people apart isn't so easy, especially at the level of the atom, say physicists. Your body has about 10^28 atoms. That's a I followed by 28 zeroes. Electric fields hold them all together in complex molecular patterns. Much stronger forces hold each atom together. Breaking all those bonds would require heating you to millions and millions of degrees. Talk about sunburned.
If you tried to turn those atoms into energy, it would be even more difficult. For that, you'd need about 100,000-ton nuclear explosions. Either way, dematerializing someone would be quite violent. Even if you succeeded, how would any transporter rebuild the person?
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Who's Your Cousin?
The great apes are among the most popular animals in most zoos. Their actions, facial expressions, and family life remind us so much of ourselves. Have you ever wondered, though, how we might look to them?
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To figure out if we can die of boredom, we first have to understand what boredom is. For help, we called James Danckert, a psychologist who studies boredom at the University of Waterloo in Canada.
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Serge Wich’s favorite days at work are spent out in the forest, studying orangutans in Sumatra and Borneo or chimpanzees in Tanzania.
ELODIE FREYMANN
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THE LEFT OVERS
A lot has happened for modern humans to get to this point. We lost most of our hair, learned how to make tools, established civilizations, sent a person to the Moon, and invented artificial intelligence. Whew! With all of these changes, our bodies have changed, too. It’s only taken us about six million years.
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