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From: mangoe@umcp-cs.UUCP (Charley Wingate)
Newsgroups: net.sf-lovers
Subject: Re: transporters
Message-ID: <1673@umcp-cs.UUCP>
Date: Tue, 24-Sep-85 13:58:47 EDT
Article-I.D.: umcp-cs.1673
Posted: Tue Sep 24 13:58:47 1985
Date-Received: Fri, 27-Sep-85 07:25:49 EDT
References: <3709@topaz.RUTGERS.EDU>
Organization: U of Maryland, Computer Science Dept., College Park, MD
Lines: 14

In article <3709@topaz.RUTGERS.EDU> Lubkin@topaz.RUTGERS.EDU writes:

>The unofficial official explanation for how the Enterprise's transporters
>work is that they convert matter to energy, zap the energy somewhere, and
>then convert the energy back to matter, *not* by scanning your body for
>information content, blasting you, and then making a new one at the other
>end, as Blish unfortunately explained in _Spock Must Die_.

The two explanations are the same.  Otherwise, if you just dumped the energy
somewhere else without imposing the information content of the second
explanation, the Second Law of Thermodynamics takes over and you just get an
undifferentiated cloud of particles at high energy.

Charley Wingate