Who are the Inventors now?

Sometime ago there was a PBS series called "connections" which showed how people discover or invent stuff. Any invention is the result of some other prior ideas, discovery and inventions. Fantasy ideas have been going on even before humans were able to write them down.

Today, for every science Fiction writers there is probably 100 or 1000 people who thought of stuff but did not put it in writing. When an invention is ready to occur, it is because the pre-facts are being used in close proximity and then someone has a epiphany. That someone can be simultaneously several - which might follow the statistical probabilities.

For example, engineers have been working on creating a LCD panel on a plastic substrate ever since LCD came out. Now they are successful. In the meantime, in the last two years you see flexible diplays in the movies. So who had the idea first?

There is a lot of military research going on which is way out of what writers can think about because it is, as they say out in the left field. But sometimes talented writers hit the nail on the head because they could easily play dual roles as inventors and writers - like Tom Clancy. Same with Harlan Ellison who was the conceptual consultant for Babylon5.

The most famous one is still Arthur C. Clark who was basically an engineer first and writer second. He obtained first class honors in Physics and Mathematics at the King's College, London, in 1948.

It is a long road from imagination to invention. The real inventors need all the help they can get.

 

Teleportation

In 1993 an international group of six scientists, including IBM Fellow Charles H. Bennett, confirmed the intuitions of the majority of science fiction writers by showing that perfect teleportation is indeed possible in principle, but only if the original is destroyed. Meanwhile, other scientists are planning experiments to demonstrate teleportation in microscopic objects, such as single atoms or photons, in the next few years. But science fiction fans will be disappointed to learn that no one expects to be able to teleport people or other macroscopic objects in the foreseeable future, for a variety of engineering reasons, even though it would not violate any fundamental law to do so.

Until recently, teleportation was not taken seriously by scientists, because it was thought to violate the uncertainty principle of quantum mechanics, which forbids any measuring or scanning process from extracting all the information in an atom or other object. According to the uncertainty principle, the more accurately an object is scanned, the more it is disturbed by the scanning process, until one reaches a point where the object's original state has been completely disrupted, still without having extracted enough information to make a perfect replica. This sounds like a solid argument against teleportation: if one cannot extract enough information from an object to make a perfect copy, it would seem that a perfect copy cannot be made. But the six scientists found a way to make an end-run around this logic, using a celebrated and paradoxical feature of quantum mechanics known as the Einstein-Podolsky-Rosen effect. In brief, they found a way to scan out part of the information from an object A, which one wishes to teleport, while causing the remaining, unscanned, part of the information to pass, via the Einstein-Podolsky-Rosen effect, into another object C which has never been in contact with A. Later, by applying to C a treatment depending on the scanned-out information, it is possible to maneuver C into exactly the same state as A was in before it was scanned. A itself is no longer in that state, having been thoroughly disrupted by the scanning, so what has been achieved is teleportation, not replication.