-[ Quoting Richard Meic , to Dennis Menard ]-
 DM> It has been thought to be impossible, true.
 RM> You remind me of a friend of mine,... he has too much faith in
 RM> science.
:)  Actually, I have no faith in science at all, Richard ... as that would
invoke religious baggage; however, I am thoroughly fascinated by what it has
been able to do, what it is in the process of doing, and what it indicates
may be possible for it to do in the future.
 DM> But, you know, every
 DM> new day seems to bring new surprises.  I can't recall who said:
 DM> "Everything is im-possible, until it's been done; then it becomes
 DM> common."  :)
 RM> Science cannot do everything.  What happened was not teleportation,
 RM> simply a particle being created in one place and destroyed in another.
True, science cannot do everything.
Your description of the Austrian experiment is much like the "Move File"
command in DOS: copy to a new location and delete from the old.  Perhaps it
is the definitions which fail, though, and not the science.  For example:
Gilles Brassard, of Universite de Montreal, described it, thus (in 1992):
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"Teleportation is a process by which an object is made to disappear from one
location," says Brassard, "and reappear intact somewhere else. It is not
necessary that matter be moved at all: provided the raw material is
available at the receiving end, it is sufficient to transmit the information
required for reconstruction. Even though matter is not actually transmitted,
we call it teleportation because the process is necessarily destructive: the
subject cannot be reconstructed at the receiving end without being utterly
and irreversibly disrupted in the sending apparatus."
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By G.Brassard's 1992 definition, the successful Austrian experiment of 1997
is, in fact, teleportation, by definition.  Are there any dictionaries which
provide a different definition for the term?
I did not find the term, "teleport(ation)," in the New Collins Concise
Dictionary; but, in the Oxford Concise Dictionary, for example, "teleport"
is defined as, "Move by telekinesis," which strikes me as more occult than
scientific.  There's no entry in the American Heritage Dictionary, 3rd Ed.
In the Gage Canadian Dictionary, "teleport" is defined as "move (something)
without touching it, by telekinesis."  And the Merriam-Webster Collegiate
Dictionary defines "teleport" as "to transfer by teleportation," dating from
the year 1947, while the term "teleportation" is defined as, "the act or
process of moving an object or person by psychokinesis," dating from the
year 1931.  Do any of the above definitions accurately describe the results
of the Austrian experiment?  More importantly, do they describe the TRANS-
MISSION of matter from one place to another by ANY means (ie, the notion
that StarTrek fans have applied to teleportation)?  And, finally, does any
of this describe what "you" understand teleportation to be?
Do we need another term?  Or should the term "teleportation" be re-defined?
Would Gilles Brassard's definition be more appropos than the current one?
When it comes to definitions, there are two things which, I think, are
worth keeping in mind: 1) dictionary definitions are "common usage" defini-
tions and, 2) are "common usage" definitions always sufficient to describe,
accurately, things which are uncommon, highly technical, exotic, etc.?
--
... Mount St Helens should have used earth control.
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