That, I believe, is explained with the Heisenberg compensator thing. Patterns with thinking brains in them cannot be stored for hours or even that many minutes with sufficent fidelity - they almost always have to be transported ‘live’ (though Scotty famously found a way to get around that - but even his method was only half genius.)
Otherwise, if you tried, you’d find out that all of the atoms were reconstructed fine, and each atom had the right number of electrons, but the electrons didn’t have the same position and/or velocity as in the original sample. For most of a person’s body, that doesn’t matter, but in the brain the electron stuff would add up to an unstable shift in mental state. Instant transporter psychosis - the red shirt guy would be brought back crazy, and probably try to assasinate Kirk at the worst possible moment.
That’s simple enough to explain. Since the pattern buffer stores quantum information, in order to get the information from the pattern buffer to another form (like, say, a living material body) you have to delete the information from the buffer in the process. This could also, in principle, solve the famous problems with the Heisenberg principle: The information is never actually measured classically. So you could store a person indefinitely, but you won’t have a copy of him running around on the planet’s surface.
Maybe it’s more like Schrodinger’s cat; when transporting, you exist simultaneously in two superimposed quantum states, so that you can be both alive on the ship and dead on the planet, as long as nobody observes either one of you in a red shirt, unless one of you is made of antimatter, in which case the other one will have to be evil, at which point the waveform collapses into either a bearded or beardless state.
I wonder if Schrodinger’s wife ever knitted a red shirt for the cat.
Since people are hijacking this thread with Hitchhiker quotes I thought I’d mention that in an old JLA comic Jade and Wonder Woman hint that being transported feels like a orgasm!
It’s unlikely that their pain will last all that long, though. What with either being spontaneously combusted or frozen solid from the change in their potential energy (from orbit to planetside, likely to be quite a fair bit of difference), and then being flung off to the far horizon since their acceleration frame-of-reference on the ship can’t be the same as that of the planet, so they’ll be moving at a different speed relative to the ground…
Yah, yah, i know, Heisenberg compensators.
Didn’t the mouthy turds actually turn out to be people trapped in the matter stream. ISTR that Reg had to grab on to one of 'em mid-transport, causing all kinds of hijinks at the transporter counsel.
Which would make the entire transporter experience ever so much ookier: (1) you’re dissolved, (2) you’re turned into a floating turd with teeth in sparkly space, (3) you re-materialize only to have your eardrums explode, spontaneously burst into flames, and be flung into the nearest mountains at thousands of kph with a very nice sonic boom.
