Is teleportation a science that is feasible, or does it defy the laws of physics?

Question

In watching Star Trek & the Fly, the teleporters all beckon the question- is teleportation a science that is a physical impossibility- or is it a possibility? What is the mechanical process that would break a solid object down into energy? And what reassembles that object on the other side? And is it possible what arrives is in fact the same thing that teleported, or simply a copy therof? The Fly presented an interesting notion- with two lifeforms in a telepod, they would be spliced together if teleported. Of course since we carry thousands of miscroscopic organisms, wouldn't thier genes be spiced as well?
I never understood why on Star trek, people beaming up and down didnt collapse into a puddle of protoplasm- unless they were in a gravity free field, that kept them upright until they fully beamed in.
Do you think teleportaion, as depicted in Star trek can ever be acheived?
How could an object in motion be teleported, yet retain its original form and appearance?

I do recall that Outer Limits episode where a woman traveled to a staion on the moon and was beamed to another planet (with the help of some intelligent dinosaurs)- But the 'redundancy' as it was called, or her original body was to be destroyed in the process. The story dealt with the human worker trying to save her original body from being destroyed. Somehow I doubt travel by telepod will become poular if it neccessitates the destruction of your body, and a copy enjoys your vacation package..

Answer 1

Your suspicion is correct - they would break a number of basic laws of physics.

The first problem is a fundamental principle of quantum mechanics - the uncertainty principle - that basically means you can never extract enough information from a system to recreate it. This single fact shoots teleportation in the foot.

Secondly, you cannot arbitrarily convert matter to energy and vice versa. Important quantum numbers - such as baryon number - are conserved in the universe, so only certain transitions are allowed.

Thirdly, the amount of energy involved is unimaginably large.

It is true that experiments are being conducted today on what is called quantum teleportation, but this really is a misnomer for what is going on - presumably the scientists involved want to hype their work to either get more money or a shot on reality TV. The reality is that these experiments work only with single particles, and that they require the sending and recieveing ends to be constructed to be part of the same quantum system - which kind of defeats the object of what you are looking for.

Answer 2

I don't know that it defies the laws of physics, but is certainly not feasible. To reconstruct a living creature, the transporter sending unit would have to tear the creature down into not just its individual atoms but down into its subatomic particles. It would then have to transmit the particles and the instructions for reconstructing each atom and returning them to the exact same relative position in the creature.

A more realistic approach would be to transmit only the instructions and reconstruct the creature on the receiving end from a pool of raw materials. This would be a copy and the original would have to be destroyed or else there would be two. That was the premise of an episode of the Outer Limits I believe.

There actually is a prototype of an three dimensional fax machine. An object is scanned in and a three dimensional copy is constructed from layers of paper, but this is still a copier. If doesn't actually move the object from point A to point B.

The most realist way that we might one day reproduce the transporter effect might be to create small worm-holes that allowed someone to take a short cut through space and travel a long distance by moving though the worm-hole.

Answer 3

Each atom wouldn't need to be broken down, but the instructions for putting the atoms together would need to be transmitted. The receiving end would need to have the information as to the type of atom, its place in a molecule and the place of each molecule in relation to other molecules near it. This is a tremendous amount of information.
Another possibility is if a 3-D holographic image could be made from a surface penetrating technology such as CAT scans. At the other end the body could be reconstructed using the CAT scan information as a template.
Either way a body isn't transmitted, but the information to make one is.
For the body to be transmitted, the matter in it would need to be broken down into energy and then reassembled at the end. Assembling energy into matter with the complexity of a human would need an amount of information that would be difficult to assign a number big enough to.
Unless a new discovery is made into the nature of the energy-matter connection, I don't see this happening.

Answer 4

We don't know. They have certain effects that we can measure, beyond that, they're beyond physics. That's why they're called singularities; like the Big Bang monobloc, the rules no longer apply. Not only don't we know, we can't know. Fortunately, this means beyond the obvious gravimetric effect, what happens in a black hole doesn't matter; it can't affect the outside universe. Edit: Black Holes weren't 'discredited' for years, Stephen Hawking was one of the first to write seriously about them in his thesis in the 1970s; they were merely unproven until some time afterwards, not discredited. Discredited implies the scientific community disliked the idea. Higgs Bosons are still unproven (at present), but no-one considers them discredited.

Answer 5

science fiction often becomes science fact, star trek ideas are based in a strong basis of physic's fact and theory.....the communicator , now cell phone...food prep wall...microwave oven...and the list grows...and as to a transporter....already in it's infant steps to reality ......preliminary experiments have already transported one single molecule of matter from one area to another...the most interesting fact is that for 3.7 nanoseconds the molocule actually and simotsaniously existed in both places at once......the only real drawback is the amount of computer space that was required in order to acomplish the experiment, but this to shall be solved in the near future and change all of mankind forever !, if you place an idea into enough young minds, one or more of them will find a way to make it a reality, weather for the good or the bad !

Answer 6

Teleportation is indeed possible, but not nearly at the levels as seen on television. But science is making progress. See the source below.