Transporting, a la Star Trek, has always fascinated me. The idea of beaming from the ship to the surface seems so much simpler than sending a powered capsule.
Some have suggested there were dangers to transporting, but the stars of Star Trek never turned into raccoons or other incomplete beams, so it must be safe. The Heisenberg compensators took care of everything. *
And I wished Scotty had brought his transporter to a hotel recently where I attended a conference.
I checked in at the front lobby (main floor) and then walked up a ramp to the elevators to the rooms. My room was on the second floor, and I was confused because it seemed like the ramp had already taken me to the second floor, but no.
Others waiting at the elevator explained that you had to press the down-button to go to the second floor. We took their advice, selected DOWN outside, and pressed TWO inside. Zip, we arrived at the second floor.
We managed to get back to the conference on the main floor by pressing ONE in the elevator and being deposited at the top of the ramp. Later, when we returned to our rooms, we stood at the elevator and reasoned that if we were on ONE, we should push the up-button for the second floor.
We went to the top of the building and then back down to the second floor.
On our next attempt to go to our rooms on the second floor, after a conference session, we spotted an elevator at the bottom of the ramp. With no line. We got in. It didn’t go up at all.
Later, I got in the elevator alone. A friendly woman stood in front of the floor buttons and asked, “What floor?”
“I don’t even know anymore.”
That’s when I wished Scotty had joined our conference.
*The fictional Heisenberg compensators solves quantum uncertainty through exact tracking of particles. It answers the problem of technical impossibility in real-world physics. When Mike Okuda, a technical consultant, was asked by Time magazine how the compensators work, he answered, “It works very well, thank you.”