Would a "partially phased" Barclay equal an "energy pattern"? If so, we've seen "energy patterns" aka "energy beings" be able to interact to some extent with their environment like in "Lonely Among Us". A possible explanation for the 2 Kirks in "The Enemy Within" could come from the yellow powder being a natural filter that caused the transporter to only deposit half of Kirk's neural energy into his body upon rematerialization. The transporter then dumped the remainder of his neural energy on an imperfect duplication body (it was dying later) due to perhaps a degraded physical pattern or damage from the yellow stuff. That duplication body could have been from left over energy from the beam up as that episode identified velocity balancing as part of the process so transporters with the normal help of the engines are automatically adding/removing energy from the transporter pattern.
Whenever we hear of energy patterns in the transporting context, they seem to be separate from the phased matter stream that stores the physical person - say, Picard in the mentioned "Lonely Among Us". So using the terms as synonyms is probably nonstandard. But there's nothing to say it wouldn't be allowed in the Star Trek universe. Now there's a cool idea! Every time we get transporter duplicates, or people who are enlarged or cut down in size by the transporter, we risk making it possible to use a transporter to create infinitely many copies of a person. Again, immortality, especially if the famed neural energies can be handled separately. It would be much safer to try and postulate that only the original matter can ever be used to create anything at the other end of the process - probably because only the original matter contains all the information needed to put together the final product, and nobody else has any separate cache of information that would be needed to turn bulk matter (or matter created on the spot) into the final product. But then we need a different explanation for the duplicates... OTOH, technobabble already exists for a variety of explanations. In the episodes dealing with the phase cloak, and in "Time's Arrow", it appeared that phasing meant nudging something ever-so-slightly backward or forward in time, so that it falls out of synch with the rest of the universe. Now, on the other hand the Star Trek universe is full of anomalies on the flow of time. There are many instances where there are two of a character, say, two Picards in "Time Squared", due to time travel. We only need to assume now that transporters and other "phase technology" applications are even more susceptible to time anomalies than normal matter is, because they already involve time travel of sorts. If anything goes wrong with the "phase nudging" or, in other words, "time nudging", then it's eminently possible to get two of something without inserting any new matter. It's just something inherent in time manipulation, everywhere in Trek! (Perhaps there's a bill to pay at the Last Trump or something, tho. We don't know if such time travel really is a game of balances. But our heroes don't know it, either, and they have managed to travel in time just fine so far.) Timo Saloniemi
But 'neural energy' is meaningless. A person whose body is supercooled will exhibit lower levels of neural energy - it's not a function of personality or life force. Hmm but if we modify that to suggest that the quantum entangled energy is spread between the two bodies it might gel. Evil Kirk's behaviour is different because his genes have been mutated and the same is true for good Kirk. They have the same memories. I would postulate that the powder caused some kind of hiccup in the quantum entanglement process, which led to a signal spread out over a longer period. This led to the transporter delay. The system didn't recognise the hiccup but did what it was designed to to and added in additional matter/energy conversion to compensate for what it thought was signal leakage based on the molecular pattern stored when Kirk beamed down. If the pollen interference caused DNA replication errors when the fresh matter was added in we end up with the partially jiggered DNA. When the remainder of the signal comes in later the system goes through the process again and it was some function of the pollen that caused the first version to be good and the second one bad. It means that the 'real' person has been spread between two bodies each with DNA replication errors caused by adding in the missing matter. It might also imply that the most recent memories of the two Kirks since leaving the ship would not be exactly the same (since the memories of the planet would now be split between two bodies). One could also argue that adding in so much molecular resolution matter was what was causing Kirk to die since that tends to reproduce inanimate matter or dead people.
Just some more speculating on my part then: So when both Kirk's are combined, then the transporter is really taking energy out of the energy pattern (since in TOS terms, matter to energy and back to matter again) so only enough energy is left over for 1 Kirk. This excess energy apparently is absorbed by the engines (sneaked in thru velocity balancing). The phased part of transport could still work with both the physical matter stream (now energy) plus the neural energy stream (both energy) and it sent across a transporter frequency (phased frequency)? I'm only thinking that all of it has to go at the same time since transporters can send folks not only moving in time but also across alternate universes (or quantum universes) As to "low" neural energy I guess that would be an interesting question. If low/high neural energy is a function of the body status like active person = normal neural energy levels and frozen body = low neural energy status could not then the difference in neural energy then reside in the body and that would imply that the transporter process normally grabs everything in one go and only does the separation during rematerialization where it has to figure out how much kinetic energy to remove or add and what position to beam them back in?
I only got a C in Physics at Ordinary Level... My theory (and I am obviously just making it up) is that the quantum scan entangles the real person with energy from the other dimension, which is in no way relative to our dimension and transposes the two. Thus the person's molecules are not being ripped apart and converted into energy but rather transposed and replaced by energy. The ship keeps a molecular level scan of the person in its pattern buffer when any crewman is sent from the ship - insufficient to recreate a whole new person (quantum scans require too much information and by their very nature are transitory hence the Heisenberg Compensators are needed). This 'pattern' can be used as a guide to use the ship's power to add in molecular level information if any of the entangled energy has leaked away from the anular confinement beam and it can be used to 'recall' a quantum entangled signal that has been sent (ordinarily a singal sent a while ago would degrade but energy form Picard bucked that trend because of the alien intervention). If the signal has degraded too much the person ends up dead because too much molecular level information cannot create a living person. Occasionally, external factors interfere with the quantum entangled energy, the replicated matter, or the phased individual with varying levels of peril and/or hilarity. Edit: Interesting point about the kinetic energy adjustment. That could also lead to much hilarity and disaster.
Yes, there's that. Fortunately, though, it's also a relatively well established Star Trek concept. Perhaps 23rd century science will know better; or, more probably, people in Star Trek are put together from people in the real world, and indeed have neural energies, souls, whatnot. Certainly we have the verified existence of the Vulcan katra and the apparent existence of the Bajoran pagh. And the behavior of these seemingly physical entities might be subtly different from the behavior of "more mundane" types of matter and energy when subjected to the grinder of "phasing". For all we know, the Trek universe is built on the Asimovian concept of souls being a parasitic lifeform (or indeed a complete ecosystem of lifeforms) taking residence in suitable, available brains. And the existence of those lifeforms in that universe is well known, only discussed in different terms because it's the most natural thing in (that) world! Timo Saloniemi
I think the Katra involves implanting one's (chemical) memories onto some other recording device - either another brain or that smoky stuff in the Katric Arc through telepathic means... I just view 'neural energy' as the bio-electric part of the quantum scan that can't be adequately reproduced by a molecular scan. Personality is largely a function of our genes and memories are chemical signatures in our brains that are accessed through bio-electric links (I think).
And there is the pure energy form of the "essence of Sargon's mind" and two other survivors in "Return to Tomorrow" and the traveling life energy cloud from "The Lights of Zetar". It's quite possible in Star Trek that regular humans/vulcans/etc are stuck with physical body+essence/soul (aka "neural energy") while enlightened/evolved beings get to shed their physical bodies and/or freely move between physical and energy forms.
The weird thing is, when Wesley and Traveler discuss the idea of "time, space and thought being one and the same", other people think it's mumbo-jumbo. But nobody in Star Trek thinks that "neural energy" would be mumbo-jumbo. It's an established scientific fact and engineering parameter there! Perhaps we're witnessing a slow process of learning. First, humans consider neural energies "Vulcan mystique", then they accept them as measurable quantities that may behave oddly when phased, and finally they begin to understand how they fit into the true Theory of Everything, not merely as an intriguing biological phenomenon, but actually as a fundamental structure of the universe. A bit like gravity before Galilei, between Galilei and Einstein, and beyond... Timo Saloniemi
Well I suppose that if thoughts are energy then as long as there is some way to store memories other than chemically in a physical brain, any kind of neural network could access the memories. This would allow humans thought proceses to be converted into an energy matrix. Of course, as we've seen so many times, converting a personality (contained in our genes) to energy doesn't really work. It's possible to try and simulate a personality by programming responses to stimuli but generally it's a poor substitute.
We do have rather successful cases of personality transfer, when this takes place from a biochemical system to a completely different biochemical system (Kirk to Janice Lester and vice versa - and back!) or even from a biochemical system to a positronic one (Ira Graves to and from Data). This might be considerably easire if personality were largely dictated by "neural energy" which could be technologically manipulated as a separate entity. Even if only the ancients and a genius like Graves know the trick. Timo Saloniemi
Yeah, I realise that the storytellers allow for personality to be entirely separate from a person's physicality but then the early storytellers were also treating transporting as a magical effect that required no real explanation. It's possible that Lester's machine could transpose the individuals' physical brains while preventing antibodies from attacking the foreign matter. There could be problems down the line but it might be one explanation for what we see on screen. Modern science is now showing that a very large part of our personality is created by our DNA and DNA is physical. If you strip away the DNA e.g. by converting the being to energy, you are stripping away a large chunk of the person and you have to add that back in by some other means if you claim that the person is preserved. It's why energy beings tend to be bland, emotionless beings I suppose. I'd challenge the issue that Ira Graves' personality was successfully transferred though. Both Korby and Graves chose death precisely because their personalities were not successfully transferred. They were emulating their original personalities through programming and it was just not the same. But let's not be elitist - DNA is simply biological programming. The difference is that our DNA exists in every fibre of our being whereas the personality reactions in the android bodies would exist only in the programming. That gives the appearance of being the original person but it isn't.
Even though our science associates DNA with personality, we are stuck sometimes with Trek's science's "variations", no? Lester's machine apparently can do a "life-entity transfer" without changing the physical body as examined by McCoy. Graves and Korby, it's a little different as I think that because they were driven by denial into thinking they would be accepted in their new machine bodies. When confronted with the negative reactions from their loved ones they ended up committing suicide. This would seem to point to a successful transfer, IMHO. It was just the environment that didn't tolerate their choices...
But the fun is to try and rationalise what we see on screen by what we know of modern science rather than just give the writers an unlimited amount of rope to make stuff up. Of course TOS writers couldn't have known that Kirk's risk taking behaviour is largely due to possessing a long (or short - whatever) form of a particular gene if that's only just been discovered. If the transfer works, how could it work given what we know of DNA? Neural energy (being a method of preserving memory engrams outside a physical brain) only covers part of that story. Think of how the Trill blend works - that seems consistent with the notion that individual DNA (of the host) dictates at least part of the entity's personality. What possible method of preserving DNA related personality can we apply to these scenarios?
Sure, although if we're rationalizing it by modern science we still need to defer to the story told. Otherwise, it wouldn't be Star Trek For instance, we could say in the Star Trek universe, DNA doesn't play as big of a role in personality as in the real universe. Technically, there are differences in the Star Trek universe like antimatter that's more powerful than our real stuff (on a theoretical level), orbital nuclear weapons in the late 60s when we didn't have that, extra probes and manned, nuclear-powered spaceships as early as the mid 1990s.
Maybe that's why we come at this from different perspectives. I don't view the laws of physics as different in Trek, I view that they have 'magical' tech advantages that move the goalposts. So anti-matter is more powerful because of the interaction with the made up dilithium crystals. If the DNA goalposts have been moved it's fun to hypothesise what made up science facilitates that. An allegation that DNA just works differently in the Trekverse just doesn't do it for me
A belated point on Kirk's comments: a mid 19th century man wouldn't have any idea of quantum theory, but molecule (as we and Kirk understand the term) was an established (if not universally accepted) idea by the 1820s, so Kirk might have been tailoring his explanation to fit 'Lincoln's understanding.
I think 'converted to energy' is perfectly consistent with the quantum entanglement & phased matter theory. I'm going from my dodgy memory but I think it's the Realm of Fear explanation by Barclay that causes problems. Doesn't he (an engineer) describe people being disassembled molecule by molecule or something? Which is odd since the episode is also the only one that features proper phased matter as well...
We can always argue that whenever Barclay or McCoy describes the transporter, he's putting in a lot of hyperbole. If they had a fear of flying instead, and described commercial aircraft today, it would probably go something like "Being torn from the ground by a metal beast riding on flimsily flapping wings bolted to a hull thin as a beer can, propelled by firecrackers that spew turbine wings like so much confetti at the slightest turbulence, is not my idea of a fun holiday!". This quite regardless of minor facts such as the aircraft being made largely of composites, with rigid wings, without a single bolt joint, and operating on engines not particularly closely related to the rocket principle. Timo Saloniemi
I don't believe that there's any dimensional phasing implied. The operative word is "dematerialize", there are so many references to "scrambled molecules" and being taken apart. If you were phasing from one place to the next, you wouldn't be taken apart. This very premise means that the target is fully scanned, torn apart, then reassembled in some remote location. In essence the person is killed first. But... we all know that it's not shown like that. Not only do we have a number of episodes where there is consciousness in the beaming participants while the process takes place (they can observe things in their surroundings before fully dematerialized), there was an episode with Barclay showing the beamed person's point of view... that was really peculiar. Like you're enveloped in a swarm of sparkly energy and then you're magically whisked away to another destination, conscious the whole time (which doesn't make sense if your body is converted to energy for the trip). So... there are inconsistencies in terminology and depiction. Stepping back, this is all imagination. Just because we can imagine something doesn't mean we can conjure the ability to create it. I believe the transporter technology is such an imaginary concept. I do realize that scientists are researching the ability to transport things in this fashion, but it's only pure energy. Let's see them do it with inert elements. Even that would be an amazing feat. But organic matter? That's 1000 times more complex. Anyway, I realize that there are people here steadfast in believing we'll have the technology someday, no matter what counter argument is made. That's OK. I've said what I needed to say.