This was shortly after Star Trek had debuted on television, and a
central attraction was the teleporter (“beam me up, Scotty”), a
concept I was already quite familiar with as an avid science fiction
reader. So I decided, during that class hour, to examine ways in which
a teleportation device might be constructed. Most of the content of
the paper was outlined in that same hour.
The main idea looked at was to 3D raster scan (“like with
television”) an object while disassembling it into its atomic
components, and create a data file of the structure on the fly. The
atoms were then accelerated by a particle accelerator, while the data
file was sent by radio.
At the receiving end, another particle accelerator running in
reverse would decelerate the atoms. A radio receiver and computer took
the incoming data file, and used it to reassemble the object,
atom-by-atom.
And so, the idea of assembling atoms by design hardly requires a
Ph.D. to conceive. It is in fact something a twelve-year-old could come
with.
Forrest Bishop