Minute Physics has joined the ongoing conversation about transporters and logical paradoxes with a really quick and concise explanation of the no-cloning theorem.
The theorem postulates an that an object cannot be duplicated while in a quantum state, and making human teleportation impossible.
…quantum teleportation has one pivotal property: it is impossible to create an identical copy of a quantum state without destroying the original – in fact, you HAVE to destroy the original arrangement in order to extract all the necessary information from it to construct the new, teleported, state. In fact, the relevant theorem in quantum mechanics is called the “no cloning” theorem. Now, we don’t yet know exactly how brains work to create consciousness, but if the quantum states of some electrons somewhere in the brain are critical to perfectly determining (and thus copying) “you”, then a teleporter would necessarily have to obey the rules of quantum teleportation when sending the information about the arrangement of particles that are “you” to the new location, and whatever was left behind would definitively *not* be you.
