# Does the Star Trek franchise explain how teleportation is achieved? **URL:** \ **Category:** Cafe Society\ **Tags:** star-trek-paramount\ **Created:** [April 4, 2021, 8:02pm UTC](https://boards.straightdope.com/t/does-the-star-trek-franchise-explain-how-teleportation-is-achieved/939400 "2021-04-04T20:02:36Z")\ **Posts on this page:** 11\ **Page:** 2
**Author:** ![digs](https://sea3.discourse-cdn.com/straightdope/user_avatar/boards.straightdope.com/digs/32/14889_2.png) [@digs](https://boards.straightdope.com/u/digs)\ **Post date:** [April 4, 2021, 10:41pm UTC](https://boards.straightdope.com/t/does-the-star-trek-franchise-explain-how-teleportation-is-achieved/939400/21 "2021-04-04T22:41:49Z")
ST:TNG was very clear about the method: scanning/transmission/reconstruction/disintegration of the original. Remember the second Riker (Thomas, IIRC)? The original didn’t get destroyed. And he was treated as a separate person, with his own personality, who decided to go serve on another Starship so he wouldn’t make things weird with his “twin”. And Commander Scott was a copy kept in a transporter buffer for centuries, until he was found, reconstituted (via the Lipton Soup Protocols) and put back in service to give Geordi advice. ---
**Author:** ![John\_DiFool](https://sea3.discourse-cdn.com/straightdope/user_avatar/boards.straightdope.com/john_difool/32/19543_2.png) [@John\_DiFool](https://boards.straightdope.com/u/John_DiFool)\ **Post date:** [April 4, 2021, 10:44pm UTC](https://boards.straightdope.com/t/does-the-star-trek-franchise-explain-how-teleportation-is-achieved/939400/22 "2021-04-04T22:44:31Z")
Recent thread from 2 weeks ago which discussed these issues. > [@Star Trek tech features that logically should exist but didn't seem to](https://boards.straightdope.com/t/star-trek-tech-features-that-logically-should-exist-but-didnt-seem-to/938193): > > In the Star Trek quote thread, there’s a quote from a character saying something to the effect that they’re glad someone grabbed 'em of they’d have fallen, and “it’s a long way to the bottom of the warp core.” Why would an accidental fall of such danger even be a possibility? The Enterprise computer knows where every living being on the ship is at all times. Enterprise is in space; all gravity is artificially created. Enterprise, and pretty much every other Federation vessel, has transporters… ---
**Author:** ![terentii](https://sea3.discourse-cdn.com/straightdope/user_avatar/boards.straightdope.com/terentii/32/212_2.png) [@terentii](https://boards.straightdope.com/u/terentii)\ **Post date:** [April 4, 2021, 11:00pm UTC](https://boards.straightdope.com/t/does-the-star-trek-franchise-explain-how-teleportation-is-achieved/939400/23 "2021-04-04T23:00:38Z")
The “horrifying” aspect is referred to in James Blish’s original novel _ **Spock Must Die!** _ as “McCoy’s Paradox.” To which Scotty replied “A difference that _makes_ no difference _is_ no difference!” To which McCoy responded (roughly) “But how do we _know_ we’re the same after we’re reassembled?” and “If you’re wrong, we’re committing murder whenever we put someone through the transporter for the first time.” ---
**Author:** ![phs3](https://avatars.discourse-cdn.com/v4/letter/p/8491ac/32.png) [@phs3](https://boards.straightdope.com/u/phs3)\ **Post date:** [April 5, 2021, 10:06pm UTC](https://boards.straightdope.com/t/does-the-star-trek-franchise-explain-how-teleportation-is-achieved/939400/24 "2021-04-05T22:06:58Z")
> [@kenobi\_65](#): > > the only times that the shows ever really delved into any of the minutiae of how the transporters worked was when the plot required there to be issues with the transporters Ah yes, as in TOS “Doomsday Machine”, when Kirk is saying “Gentlemen, I \*\*\*\*ing suggest you \*\*\*\*ing beam me \*\*\*\*ing aboard RIGHT \*\*\*\*ING NOW”! I think it’s worth noting explicitly that the true genius of the transporter is that it streamlines the plot. No “off to the shuttlecraft!” and then having to park it, etc. (other than when they WANT one for other plot reasons, of course). Especially given how relatively simple the effect is, it’s just a brilliant hack. And yes, I know that even that simple effect was expensive back in 1967, but less so than the alternatives. ---
**Author:** ![Mangetout](https://sea3.discourse-cdn.com/straightdope/user_avatar/boards.straightdope.com/mangetout/32/19_2.png) [@Mangetout](https://boards.straightdope.com/u/Mangetout)\ **Post date:** [April 5, 2021, 10:59pm UTC](https://boards.straightdope.com/t/does-the-star-trek-franchise-explain-how-teleportation-is-achieved/939400/25 "2021-04-05T22:59:42Z")
Me too - I think he calls it _displacement_; not so much transmission of a person, but rather, tinkering with the universe in such a way as to alter the coordinates of placement of an object. ---
**Author:** ![abcdefghij](https://avatars.discourse-cdn.com/v4/letter/a/43a26b/32.png) [@abcdefghij](https://boards.straightdope.com/u/abcdefghij)\ **Post date:** [April 6, 2021, 12:12am UTC](https://boards.straightdope.com/t/does-the-star-trek-franchise-explain-how-teleportation-is-achieved/939400/26 "2021-04-06T00:12:34Z")
> [@JRDelirious](#): > > you don’t even get scorch marks where their shoes were. They put the shoes in subspace ---
**Author:** ![mbh](https://avatars.discourse-cdn.com/v4/letter/m/a6a055/32.png) [@mbh](https://boards.straightdope.com/u/mbh)\ **Post date:** [April 6, 2021, 2:13pm UTC](https://boards.straightdope.com/t/does-the-star-trek-franchise-explain-how-teleportation-is-achieved/939400/27 "2021-04-06T14:13:57Z")
> [@eburacum\_45](#): > > I’m quite fond of the teleportation process in Larry Niven’s _Flash Crowd_ stories, which involves the conversion of each traveller into a single large neutrino-like particle with all the characteristics of the original, including momentum. > [@Mangetout](#): > > Me too - I think he calls it _displacement_ ; not so much transmission of a person, but rather, tinkering with the universe in such a way as to alter the coordinates of placement of an object. In one story, he calls it the “enhanced tunnel diode effect”, likening it to the behavior of an electron in a P orbital. ---
**Author:** ![Mangetout](https://sea3.discourse-cdn.com/straightdope/user_avatar/boards.straightdope.com/mangetout/32/19_2.png) [@Mangetout](https://boards.straightdope.com/u/Mangetout)\ **Post date:** [April 6, 2021, 2:36pm UTC](https://boards.straightdope.com/t/does-the-star-trek-franchise-explain-how-teleportation-is-achieved/939400/28 "2021-04-06T14:36:42Z")
> [@digs](#): > > Remember the second Riker (Thomas, IIRC)? The original didn’t get destroyed. And he was treated as a separate person, with his own personality, who decided to go serve on another Starship so he wouldn’t make things weird with his “twin”. The only sense in which Thomas Riker wasn’t the ‘original Riker’ is that he got stranded alone on Nervala IV for 8 years and this different life changed him - that is, at the point of the accident ( **after** dematerialisation during beam-up), two Rikers were rematerialised - one on the ship, one back down on the planet. At that exact moment, either of them had as much claim to _be Riker_ as the other. So you have ‘two originals’ or ‘two copies’ depending on whether you consider the normal process or transportation to result in ‘one original’ or ‘one copy’. ---
**Author:** ![shh1313](https://sea3.discourse-cdn.com/straightdope/user_avatar/boards.straightdope.com/shh1313/32/8020_2.png) [@shh1313](https://boards.straightdope.com/u/shh1313)\ **Post date:** [April 6, 2021, 9:59pm UTC](https://boards.straightdope.com/t/does-the-star-trek-franchise-explain-how-teleportation-is-achieved/939400/29 "2021-04-06T21:59:13Z")
Researchers teleport particle of light six kilometres.!! " Being entangled means that the two photons that form an entangled pair have properties that are linked regardless of how far the two are separated, explains Tittel. When one of the photons was sent over to City Hall, it remained entangled with the photon that stayed at the University of Calgary. Next, the photon whose state was teleported to the university was generated in a third location in Calgary and then also travelled to City Hall where it met the photon that was part of the entangled pair. What happened is the instantaneous and disembodied transfer of the photon’s quantum state onto the remaining photon of the entangled pair, which is the one that remained six kilometres away at the university, says Tittel." > **[Towards quantum Internet: Researchers teleport particle of light six kilometres](https://phys.org/news/2016-09-quantum-internet-teleport-particle-kilometres.html?utm_source=menu&utm_medium=link&utm_campaign=item-menu)** > > What if you could behave like the crew on the Starship Enterprise and teleport yourself home or anywhere else in the world? As a human, you're probably not going to realize this any time soon; if you're a photon, you might want to keep reading. --------------MORE INFO---- Yin, J., Ren, JG., Lu, H. et al. Quantum teleportation and entanglement distribution over 100-kilometre free-space channels. [Quantum teleportation and entanglement distribution over 100-kilometre free-space channels | Nature](https://doi.org/10.1038/nature11332) ---------More news------ Quantum Internet: "is predicted to be the next-generation information processing platform, promising secure communication and an exponential speed-up in distributed computation. The benchmark for a global quantum internet is quantum teleportation of independent qubits over a free-space link whose attenuation corresponds to the path between a satellite and a ground station. The experiment uses two free-space optical links, quantum and classical, over 143 kilometres between the two Canary Islands of La Palma and Tenerife. The average teleported state fidelity is well beyond the classical limit." [https://www.nature.com/articles/nature11472](https://www.nature.com/articles/nature11472) Wow! Wonder how the progress is on the quantum computer? ---
**Author:** ![Monty](https://sea3.discourse-cdn.com/straightdope/user_avatar/boards.straightdope.com/monty/32/47_2.png) [@Monty](https://boards.straightdope.com/u/Monty)\ **Post date:** [April 7, 2021, 2:50am UTC](https://boards.straightdope.com/t/does-the-star-trek-franchise-explain-how-teleportation-is-achieved/939400/30 "2021-04-07T02:50:22Z")
I always thought that the “in-universe” explanation for the _Star Trek_ transporter system should have connected it to the warp drive (faster-than-light drive). That way there’s no issue with scrambling atoms, restoring the wrong entity, or even the bit about mass murder linked above. ---
**Author:** ![JRDelirious](https://sea3.discourse-cdn.com/straightdope/user_avatar/boards.straightdope.com/jrdelirious/32/9531_2.png) [@JRDelirious](https://boards.straightdope.com/u/JRDelirious)\ **Post date:** [April 11, 2021, 5:59pm UTC](https://boards.straightdope.com/t/does-the-star-trek-franchise-explain-how-teleportation-is-achieved/939400/31 "2021-04-11T17:59:20Z")
If someone had sat down to try and make things consistent they probably could have come up with that – having the transporter be a warp app that jumps a relatively small object point-to-point within a limited range at one time, and the FTL drive a warp app that keeps the device itself and the large attached vessel under a sustained warp along a trajectory you point it on. You’re right that you’d have probably lost the “duplication” plots, though. But at the time who expected anyone to be trying to figure this out? Anyway teleportation was a familiar SF trope (heck, Duck Dodgers in the 24 and 1/2 Century was using “evaporators” in the 1950s cartoon) so it was easy to reach for it. [Previous page](https://boards.straightdope.com/t/does-the-star-trek-franchise-explain-how-teleportation-is-achieved/939400.md?page=1)