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