: There's also the kinetic energy transfer problems addressed by Niven in
: Playgrounds of the Mind , IIRC. (Yes, it was collected from somewhere else
: but I can't remember from where for the life of me.)
: -- Steve is trapped at work, far away from his research resources.
See some of the posts below. Wow, it's interesting where this thread has brought us. First of all, I don't think that any of us are expert enough to fully understand the process. The overall point of the announcement today was that scientists were able to bring about a quantum swap of two atoms - i.e. the two atoms exchanged their quantum states. The nice thing about quantum tunneling - something that has long been known to be possible - is that there is no need to violate the uncertainty principle. We never really interrogate the quantum states of the atoms involved - i.e. we don't actually need to measure or deconstruct anything. The big problem is that if you even could scale the process up to transfer an entire person, you would need a duplicate "blank" twin at the other end with identical atoms with which to exchange quantum states. Thus you would still need to transmit a hell of a lot of information from which to assemble your double. No need to worry about whether the new, transported you is really you - quantum exchange would make this irrelevant. I don't know if this would ever be possible, but my hope is that rather than using a duplicate person at the receiving end, you could use some sort of innert undifferentiated matter - stem matter if you will - that would take the form of the transmitted individual in the quantum process. Likewise, your former self would revert to undifferentiated matter at the transmitting end. It's fun to speculate . . .
