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Comment by krapp | Hacker News Reader

Star Trek "does it" by literally converting matter into energy, beaming that energy to a remote point, then converting it back into matter... in place... somehow by teching the tech. That's usually what people mean when they say "teleportation" - actually somehow instantaneously moving a thing from point A to B, rather than transferring its state.

I'm not certain whether somehow mass-entangling an entire object with something else that receives its state and becomes a perfect (or near perfect because real life doesn't have "Heisenberg compensators" like Trek, to compensate for the Heisenberging) copy of the original is more or less ridiculous than Star Trek's version.

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> actually somehow instantaneously moving a thing from point A to B, rather than transferring its state.

Is it ever explicitly called out that teleportation instantaneously moves matter?

I'm not a huge fan, but from what I've seen there is a max range they can teleport. Even taking them orbiting a planet, it usually take about 2-3 seconds or so for the teleportation to go through. Transferring state via EM waves at the speed of light (300km/s) that still gets you between half a million and a million kilometers distance in 2-3 seconds. Seems like plenty range to not need anything instantaneous.

>Is it ever explicitly called out that teleportation instantaneously moves matter?

No. Maybe "relatively instantaneously" would be more accurate. Although if we're considering the concept of teleportation as a science fictional plot device in general, it depends, and even within Star Trek, the transporters worked however the plot required.

Trek style transporters did still "move" some kind of matter stream, though. In one episode, the stream bounced off some clouds when an away team was beaming off of a planet and accidentally created a duplicate of Riker.

> Transferring state via EM waves at the speed of light (300km/s) that still gets you between half a million and a million kilometers distance in 2-3 seconds. Seems like plenty range to not need anything instantaneous.

Notwithstanding the other problems involved[0], sending only state still requires that state to be transferred into some existing matter at the other end.

[0]https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=20782106

> That's usually what people mean when they say

Not everyone thinks in terms of Star Trek...

Is there a more widely held image of teleportation held by lay people?

This should be called what it was originally "spooky action at a distance". Calling it teleportation is marketing.

But it's still the closest proxy for the average person.

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