What are your thoughts on transporter beams (commonly seen in Star Trek and other Sci-Fi films)?

Do you use them in your books?

They're working on making them possible, I think. It uses a lot of quantum physics and computing. I'd never use them though, personally, because they work by breaking down the person's chemical and biological data into computer data, sending them to somewhere else, and then rebuilding the person in an entirely new body.

I don't really use them in my books, either.

Yep, I did hear about that. It will be interesting to see if they actually figure out how to "break down" the DNA and process it through a computer and rematerialize the person (at the same point of life as they were before).

I'd say it's a pretty complicated process!

Not just DNA, either. Everything. The amount of chemicals in the body. The amount of toxins. Nerve connections that hold memories. You're right. It is extremely complicated in a degree that is nearly unbelievable.

Yeah, they're not the most plausible things ever, I don't think, but you can generally get away with them in a lot of SF if you want. I don't intend to ever use them myself, though.

We watch a lot of Star Trek, where transporter accidents are as common as car crashes, so we talk a lot about the sheer complications and huge risk involved in actually doing that. It's an interesting study.

Yeah, I've seen that too in Trek. One of the reasons I'd never use them, too. Transporter accidents are worse than car accidents, I think. I wonder what would let people allow them to be used regularly?

I considered doing this in a fantasy series (that's how a MC got to the other world), but ditched it when it only complicated things. Of course, upon realizing the complications, I took the easy way to make it work and said "God made it work, not the science."
Of course, this could be an easy way to make superheroes/villains: they are taken apart and realigned with added parts to give them powers.

I have a teleporter in my novel. I have it being as an emerging technology and they don't have it all figured out yet.

Yeah, teleporter accident = splatted molecules.

I agree that it's not a very, shall we say, realistic science, but it fits with the tone of certain futuristic sci-fi's like Star Trek.

People would use them for the same reasons people drive cars and fly planes and work with heavy machinery, Varon. There are many elements of our daily life that, when used improperly or in the case of accident/malfunction, can kill or seriously injure us. But we continue to use them because the science has been perfected to the point of usability and general safety, and because we follow the necessary precautions. We wear seatbelts and follow the rules of the road and don't text and drive. There will still be crashes, but the convenience and necessity of driving cars will force us to continue to use them. Or society has advanced to the point where not being able to drive can be extremely prohibitive. Even if you don't drive you have to walk/bike on the road with cars and are at just as high a risk for fatal crashes. If a futuristic society advanced to the point where transporters were necessary and/or frequently used, the average person would have little choice but to consent to the trend.

I love the idea of a transporter accident generating a superhero.

It's realistic science, actually. They've done it with a few atoms. It uses quantum stuff to work.

Well how do you like that. Cool. Irregardless, let's put it this way--it's a rather fantastical and perhaps a bit disturbing science.

When I've seen explanations for why a "transporter beam" could not possibly work, both in science fiction and in nominally factual publications, quantum effects are usually mentioned as the final blow preventing the technology from being a possibility, at least for transporting human beings. They tend to be (though not all are) resting on the assumption that consciousness, personality, and free will come down to that level (everything above being seen as deterministic I think), so the transfer would have to be without error down to the quantum level ... and the Heisenberg Uncertainty Principle says that it's not possible for us to measure the position of a quantum particle whose velocity we know, or the velocity of a quantum particle whose position we know.

There's also the problem that "quantum stuff" is (as far as I can see) the single branch of applied science having the most trouble "scaling up." A few atoms are a useful first step, but are hardly a proof of concept.

None of this should necessarily stop an author from using "transporter beams" in his or her story; like it or not they've become a common element---a "trope"---in certain branches of science fiction, and so are, like faster-than-light travel, something readers have been trained to expect in some contexts ... and quantum physics and/or mechanics is as good a source as any for the hand-wave-y explanation aka doubletalk with which the technology is described. (Far better than Lewis's use of "the less observed properties of solar radiation" in Out of the Silent Planet)