Yes, that always bothered me. Just like momentum would clearly be changed by the teleportation device itself, rather than assuming that the teleported object magically preserved its momentum when being teleported. After all, if your device is assembling the object that it’s teleported it’s also giving each particle the correct momentum, which means the device itself is exerting the needed force. Which explains why his “perpetual waterfall” device isn’t a perpetual motion machine.
Unless the teleporter works by some other mechanism than the classic “assemble the teleported object bit by bit from atoms you have at hand”. Niven’s teleporters act as if they simply open a magic portal in space between two points.
The light-years range runcible teleporters in Neal Asher’s Polity books have to deal with different amounts of kenetic energy between different planets/locations in the galaxy. It is a key plot element in the first book. (If that buffer fails, the results are bad.)
Niven did address it. Teleport with the Earth’s spin, and when you materialize at your destination you are thrown to the ceiling. Teleport against the Earth’s spin, and you are thrown to the floor. Teleport north or south, and you will be shoved horizontally. (Relative to the Earth, of course. Relative to you, the Earth at your destination is moving with a different vector.) He kind of handwaved vertical jumps, and posited that the change in gravitational potential energy might manifest as a change in thermal energy. Teleport uphill, you get colder. Teleport downhill, you get hotter.
He assumed that as the technology improved, the teleportation machine itself would add or subtract energy and momentum to you to compensate for the difference in velocity between your starting point and your endpoint. He envisioned a giant mass, floating in the ocean, that would serve as a source of, or sink for, the energy and momentum that the teleporter needed to use to let you arrive at your destination, at rest with respect to your destination.
The Adventures of Superman - Season 5 - Episode 9: “The Phony Alibi”
Professor Pepperwinkle invents a device to transport people and objects instantly through a telephone line. Criminals use the device to transmit themselves across the country after committing a crime so they will have an alibi.
Personal anecdote: my own first exposure to teleporters were the “evaporators” (elevators) in the “Duck Dodgers in the 24 and a halfth Century” cartoon (released 1953, 4 years before the original short story of The Fly) which was regularly running on TV in the mid-late 60s. Then Star Trek. Then many years later the prevous literature.
If I’m remembering correctly, a minor detail was that first adopters were putting the transporters in their living rooms. Needless to say, burglary ensued.
In Star Trek, though, the transporters almost always work perfectly, perfectly replicating in one place what once existed in another. Anything that contaminates you at your arrival point contaminated you in exactly the same position at the departure point. It doesn’t make any difference to you.
My guess is that it’s pulling apart everything simultaneously, including your nervous system, so there is no way to feel it.
I’ll say that the whole concept of the transporter in Star Trek is really creepy though. I wonder if someone will invent a tiny wormhole device as an alternative.
“I’d rather walk through a door than be chopped into tiny pieces, slid through a mail slot, and stitched back together thank you very much.”
.Buck Rogers and Flash Gordon serials had the teleporter concept and in at least one episode of Buck Rogers the teleporter was shown. This article about teleportation has a picture of the Buck Rogers teleporter and a still from The Fly as well.
I imagined that in Star Trek there were limitations to the transporter that required using shuttle craft but the show kept finding ways to expand teleporter range. Then in the first movie we see the teleporter not working right, perhaps the chances of a failure increase with distance. OTOH why assume shuttle craft never have crash landings either.
The really weird Trek episode as regards the transporter is TNG’s “Realm of Fear,” in which Barclay remains conscious and able to see things (and eventually even grasp things) within “the matter stream” during transport.
It almost feels like the writer of that episode didn’t quite understand how the transporter was supposed to work, and was thinking of it more like the “passing through a wormhole” idea.
