[alexander_busek]

[...] when God the transporter beam reconstructs a person from quantum particles (all questions of whether he has a soul or not aside), it isn't just a perfect identical twin. It is literally the same person.

Dr. McCoy might have a problem with that.

Regards,

[FredZarguna]

In the novel Spock Must Die, James Blish has a long discursis on the disintegration and reintegration of transporter victims subjects. I read it when I was a teenager and hadn't learned much real physics, but if I recall correctly, he didn't discuss the quantum mechanics of it, which is what keeps it from being murder. In classical physics, the guy at the other end of the line is a brand new Spock. [McCoy, who was "just a simple country doctor" probably didn't understand Indistinguishability. And in the book he very much did object to the whole thing.]

Of course, the ship's computer, which would crank along " ... working ... working ... " on calculations that my phone can perform instantaneously would never cut it calculating the state vector of a system of even a few atoms, let alone an entire human being. [And to be fair to the poor old gal, a computer would have to be roughly the size of the universe in order to calculate the state vector of a human being.]

Tipler's point was, if you know a person's state vector, you can create the person, because that's all a quantum mechanical system is. But only God is smart enough to do that.