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.
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.”
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.
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.
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’.
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."
---------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."
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.
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.