How Would a Heisenberg Compensator Work in Real Life? Trekkies Debate

Michael Kaplan January 24, 2023

Star Trek depicts a lot of wild technology in its various iterations and different future time periods [primarily the 23rd, 24th, and 32nd centuries).

Perhaps none is more improbable than the transporter technology widely used throughout the Federation.

According to the Thought Catalog: “Let’s postulate for a moment that it would be possible to dematerialize—or ‘energize’ as they say on screen—a human being. An even greater problem arises: getting the person back together at the desired location. There are actually several problems here. First, this technology, as used in the shows and movies, seems to have no difficulty in beaming the particles through all kinds of thick, dense materials on their way from the starship to distant locations. This is highly unlikely to be possible in reality. Neutrinos can pass through rocks and planets, but not other particles.”

Thought Catalog continues, “Even less feasible, however, is the possibility of arranging the particles in just the right order so as to preserve the person’s identity (and not kill them). There is nothing in our understanding of physics or biology that suggests we can control matter in such a way. Moreover, a person’s identity and consciousness is likely not something that can be dissolved and remade.”

Ok so let’s say you could solve that problem as the show writers have.

Sometimes even then transporter tech didn’t work so great. A horrible transporter malfunction turned both Lt. Sonak and an unnamed crewmember into a howling mass of tortured goo in Star Trek: The Motion Picture.

According to Forbes: The transporter of Star Trek seems to be one invention that’s forever beyond our reach, much to the chagrin of world travelers, would-be bank robbers and forbidden Lotharios everywhere. Sure, if you have a quantum particle on one side of a thin barrier, there’s a finite-but-non-zero chance it will wind up on the other side, even if it doesn’t have enough energy to get there. But for even a small collection of atoms, the probability of “tunneling” in that sense is so exponentially small, you could have every human that’s ever lived wait the entire age of the Universe and never have a single one move as much as a micron.

The way the transporter allegedly works isn’t to move your actual atoms, but to teleport your information from one location to another, and to reconstruct you at your destination. In the original Star Trek, the range was understood to be finite and limited to a few tens of thousands of kilometers.

In Star Trek Into Darkness, there’s a teleportation from Earth all the way to the Klingon home world. While quantum teleportation is a real phenomenon, as Chad Orzel writes, “It’s very different from how that’s conceived in Star Trek, especially considering that the transfer of information is bound by the speed of light, and the Klingon home world is around 90 light years from Earth.”

What you can do is transfer an arbitrary amount of information from one location to another through the process of quantum teleportation. The name is a bit of a misnomer, since this isn’t the teleportation of actual quantum particles, but of the information about the states of quantum particles. Make enough pairs of entangled particles between two different locations, and you can teleport that information from one location to another: you can move the state and the information of one object from point A to point B without having to move the object itself.

This discovery was made in 1993 by the team of Charles H. Bennett, Gilles Brassard, Claude Crépeau, Richard Jozsa, Asher Peres and William K. Wootters in their paper, “Teleporting an unknown quantum state via dual classical and Einstein-Podolsky-Rosen channels

Above: Emory Erickson, the inventor of the transporter, with daughter, Danica Erickson

It’s possible that combining this technique with the emerging technology of quantum computing could enable the entire information encoding a living human being to be scanned in and teleported from one location to another. Or, if you didn’t see any need to destroy you, the original copy, perhaps you could be cloned entirely via this process.

Above: Transporter console in the alternate reality‘s 2258

The challenge, however, is reconstructing that matter in the end state. Knowing what the information state of a human being is – including all their component particles – is one matter, but reconstructing that human being is quite another thing entirely. Despite a $14 trillion program launched by Russia – the National Technology Initiative – with the goal of teleporting a human being by 2035, it isn’t clear that this part of the technology is feasible given our current understanding of physics. To even dream of doing that would require not only putting all the particles that make you up back together in the same configuration, but with the same positions and momenta that they had before you were teleported.

Think about the difference between a living human and a corpse of a human: there are no particles that are necessarily different, it’s simply the way those particles are positioned and moving in that configuration. But physics won’t even let you know those two pieces of information at the same time, much less reproduce them.

You see, there’s an inherent uncertainty between momentum and position for every particle, requiring that if you know one of those traits to a certain degree of precision, the other one becomes inherently uncertain so that the product of the two is always finite and non-zero.

Lawrence Krauss, in his book The Physics of Star Trek, correctly identifies that one would need some type of hypothetical “Heisenberg Compensator” to account for this, which seems to violate the fundamental rules of quantum mechanics. When the Star Trek creators came up with the idea of Heisenberg Compensators, they were asked how they worked. Their response? “They work very well, thank you.”

Unfortunately, this is one case where no matter how far technology advances, it will always be bound by the laws of nature.

Be that though it may there’s nothing more entertaining than read Trek fans on Reddit debate the technology.

Read it below.

Scotty beam us out of this convo.