#378. LayarSci : Children of Men. Science Fiction Movie. Or Maybe Not?

Is science fiction just biding it’s time before it becomes science fact? Jules Verne had us flying into space and diving to the depths of the ocean, long before we had the technology to even consider that such adventures would one day be possible.

Children of Men is a movie that also predicts the future. One that is short on the bright and shiny. It’s 2027 and humankind hasn’t experienced a single birth in the past eighteen years. The youngest people on the planet are celebrities in the same vein we revere centenarians today. The reason for our loss of fertility is unknown and no cure to the problem seems imminent. When the future of your species is scheduled for extinction within a generation, then hope becomes a fading commodity.

Vigour, enthusiasm and the will to live are similarly in short supply. With the result that civilised society in many parts of the world has crumbled into chaos. And while The Day After Tomorrow may’ve seemed like far fetched fiction before Al Gore graced the very same screens, the Children of Men reminded me of a couple pertinent research papers on fertility.

A Danish study released in 2000 observed that otherwise healthy 19-20 year old men were showing a 30% decrease in sperm quality compared to males born earlier that century. Then in 2003 another study found that Florida juvenile male alligators had smaller penises and a 50% fall in testosterone levels. In the alligator, at least, changes were linked to increases in the nitrate-nitrogen concentrations in the water of the Everglades. (Wetlands are the kidneys of the planet, they filter waterway pollutants, yet some countries, like Australia, only have 50% of the wetlands they had 200 years ago.)

Such varied research has found itself into a book called Our Stolen Future, a review of over 4,000 scientific publications. The authors’ conclusions can be summed up thus: “The simple truth is that the way we allow chemicals to be used in society today means we are performing a vast experiment, not in the lab, but in the real world, not just on wildlife but on people.” Will the outcome of this experiment be a childless tomorrow as already envisaged by movie makers? Or will we wake up to the wisdom of the Precautionary Principle in time? ::Children of Men.

NB: fertility should not be confused with population growth. The first concerns quality, the latter quantity.

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#279. LayarSci : Could Someone Really Teleport Out of Jail?: Fringe Fact vs. Fiction

David Robert Jones is back causing mayhem. In last night's episode of Fringe, "Ability," the villainous mystery man tries to kill with an affliction that causes hyperactive scar tissue, which closes all the victim's orifices, so they can't breathe. But to execute his murderous plan, he needs to first spring himself from a German prison using a fantastically sci-fi weapon (a stolen design from our mad scientist, Walter Bishop): a disintegration-reintegration ray. This scenario may be equal to the standard of truth-stretching that we know and love in Fringe—neither Mr. Jones nor any other person will be teleported from place to place anytime soon. But there is a bizarre real-life analogue for this Star Trek tech. Just as when bank robbers walked through walls in "Safe," four episodes ago, Fringe borrows from weird phenomena that actually happen at the quantum level. Then, it was quantum tunneling, but this week it's something just as odd: quantum teleportation.

Teleportation on the quantum scale is about moving information, not zapping a person in one place and having them reappear in another. In 1998, scientists at Caltech, building on research done five years earlier at IBM, accomplished the first quantum teleportation. The Caltech researchers scanned the quantum information contained in a photon—the particle that carries light—and created a replica of it more than three feet away, at the end of a cable. Since then more and more physicists have played the teleportation game. Austrian researchers teleported the information from a laser beam in 2002. Four years later, scientists in Denmark took that one step further, teleporting the info inside a laser beam's photons into a cloud of atoms.

As PM explained last year, when the film Jumper came out, teleportation would not be possible without entanglement, a peculiar principle of quantum mechanics. Simply, two objects can be linked even when spatially separated, so that if you know the spin of one, you can know the spin of the other without even looking at it. This is particularly handy for physicists trying to work around the Heisenberg uncertainly principle, which holds that you can't look at a particle without changing it. You couldn't teleport a photon's information if you couldn't look at it, but thanks to entanglement, you don't need to—you can just look at its partner. However, Heisenberg' principle also means that the original photon's information must be destroyed as soon as it is teleported to the replica, according to University of Toronto physicist David Harrison's introduction to quantum teleportation. If that weren't the case, you could know both the polarization and angle, and Heisenberg says that you can't know these two things at once.

The teleportation phenomenon is a mysterious one—Albert Einstein famously hated the idea of entanglement and called it, roughly translated from his German, "spooky action at a distance" or "spooky interaction." But quantum teleportation, like its oddball cousin quantum tunneling, has real world implications. If it could be properly harnessed, the instant information transfer across distance could make the pace of today's high-speed Internet and computing look lethargic by comparison.

But what about human teleportation? It's totally different from information on the quantum level, but it could be possible, at least in theory. Charles Bennett, who was on the IBM team that first discovered the quantum teleportation phenomenon back in 1993, told CNN in 2007 that teleporting a human at least doesn't violate any laws of physics. He envisioned a machine that could do a three-dimensional scan of a person and assemble that information in a another place, though probably not perfectly. That would square with Mr. Jones's statement about his post-teleportation health problems in this episode: "It seems that when one is dematerialized on a molecular level and then reassembled, there are certain unadvertised side effects." However, he seems to imply that Fringe's device uses the standard Star Trek-inspired interpretation of teleportation, in which the person's material is transported and reassembled, not the real-life quantum example, where only information is transported and used to create a replica, while the original is destroyed. In any case, the technology to scan the 1028 atoms in a human body would be far more complex than anything we have today, as would the apparatus to reassemble them.

Walter Bishop solemnly warns, at the conclusion of "Ability," that his teleportation device eventually causes fates worse than death. We'll probably have to wait for future episodes to decode that cryptic remark, as well as the other new elements of "The Pattern" that showed up this week. An apocalyptic manuscript connected to Mr. Jones seems to imply that multiverses—the theory that our universe is one of many, will be coming soon to Fringe. And it appears that Agent Olivia Dunham was treated as a child with an experimental drug from the evil Massive Dynamic corporation, cleverly called "cortexifam" after the brain's cerebral cortex, that might give her some kind of telekinetic power. That might be based on some out-there science, but that's fine with Fringe star Joshua Jackson. At New York's Comic Con this week, he told PM that nothing is off-limits on the show.

Source :
http://www.popularmechanics.com

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