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Yes, that's what I've read as well. Speed and location cannot be simultaneously known. The more you know about a particle's speed, the less you know about it's location and vice versa. (The Uncertainty Principle of Heisenberg.)

The Physics of Star Trek by Lawrence M Krauss deals with the question. I don't remember the details of his chapter on teleportation, but he questions the viability of most of the Star Trek "miracles" based on the massive amounts of energy required rather than breaking any particular laws of Physics.

Well, remember that he created general relativity? So of course he did, because he saw an underlying order in the bigger picture.

Think of this:
Three cells make up an organism. Keeping track of these cells chould be easy, right? Temperature, movement, speed, food intake and waste output.

Then think of six cells. A little harder, but definately trackable.

Now 15. At this point you start making minor errors, getting cells mixed up, and end up making mistakes that lead to failure in some errors.

OK, now 25. At this point, your exhausted, your head is probably spinning, and you make errors that fail the entire experiment.

Now bring it up a notch or two. 50. Organs become recognizeable, so you begin grouping the organism. Labeling different areas. This eases some pressure, and makes things better.

Now, lets go to 1000. You may be tinking, screw that i'm going home. But organs begin to become even clearer, and small subsections of those organs as well. You then get to have fluids of sorts, and as long as you know where they come from and where theyre going your set.

Now, the leap. 1 billion. you start wondering if your insane, but at this point external features are entirely recognizeable and systems begin to emerge. You can't keep track of everything, Temperature and intake and movement etc., but organs are very simple to manage at this point.

Thats the role of general relativity. A few atoms are nice, but a solar system or even a planet are impossible. But keeping track of the grouped areas of these places might be possible or plausible.

I believe that you can teleport via entanglement, however that is because, while you cannot transmit information, you can transmit a quantum superposition/state.

Therefore if one theoretically could know the exact properties of a particle, it would give that particle infinite velocity. Basically Picard would go KABLOOIE! every time they locked a transporter beam on him. However, I remember the show explaining that away with some science mumbo jumbo called a "Heisenberg compensator," an obvious joke on the impossibility of teleportation due to uncertainty principle.

Though another thing to wrap one's brain around is, if the idea of quantum entanglement ever does yield a human teleporter would it be you coming out the other end? As it is quantum teleportation is basically a process of removing the information of your particles (effectively killing you) and putting that information into some new particles (which would be seemingly making a new you).

Not to mention, if one's particle information could be saved onto some sort of computer, then what is to stop someone from placing that information on any set of particles? One could create as many 'you's as they wanted out of whatever spare particles were floating around.


lol I love science.

isn't that like genetics?