Will a Star Trek type transporter ever be made possible?
No, probably not. The problems are 1) The colossal amount of energy needed, 2) the fact that the principle used in Star Trek would actually replicate rather than transport, and 3) Heisenberg’s uncertainty principle, which puts the kibosh on the whole thing because it means that we could never know how to reassemble the atoms. It’s not a question of computing power – this is a fundemental law of physics which means you can’t know all the information about a sub-atomic particle at the same time, which we would need to do to re-assemble. The Star Trek scripts acknowledge this, and make reference to ‘Heisenberg compensators’.
