Grrl Power #309 – Conservation of momentum into your head
It is a huge pet peeve of mine when momentum is ignored with teleporters and gateways and the like in movies. Also someone being caught six inches from the ground after falling 500 feet, especially if the person catching them is traveling laterally at terminal velocity plus. Like the first Star Trek reboot when Kirk and Sulu basically fell from low orbit and Chekov transported them the instant before they splatted, and all that happened was they fell over in the transporter. I think a grating on the floor broke. Edit: As discussed in the comments below, that may not be the best example since transporters would have to compensate for the difference between the velocity of a ship in orbit and the surface of a planet at the very least. All I’m asking for is one line in the movie which explains that, especially since it was pivotal to the scene, and I don’t recall it ever being discussed in any movie or episode of the series. It’s one of those refrigerator logic things that fans think about but I suspect the show creators never did. Granted it would invite all sorts of questions about how it can remove external momentum without stopping blood dead in its tracks or hearts or whatever, but then at least that one scene wouldn’t rank 4 eyerolls out of 5. Low orbit! Still, you guys know the sort of thing I’m talking about.
The way Harem is delivering that kick is a good way to break an ankle or worse, but don’t forget she gets physically tougher when she un-teleports some of herselves. (Which, out of context is a super weird sentence.) So when she pulls a horizontal 2 story drop into the side of someone’s stone head, she quickly contracts down to two of herself for the impact, which makes the both of them about 4 times as tough until she re-exists the dupes. She does that almost immediately because she describes not having all 5 of her out at once like a regular mono-person with walking around with an eyepatch and one ear stopped up.
Fighting Harem would basically be the worst. She’s master of the blindside, and it’s hard as hell to hit her. Obviously a skilled fighter could beat her, (she’s never beaten Math) and if you get one good hit in, it staggers the rest of her.
I asked on twitter what it’s called when gravity overcomes upward velocity and I got a lot of answers, Ballistic Apogee and Trajectory Apex both sound cool but I think those are names for the highest point of the parabola, not necessarily names for gravity countering momentum. Harem went with “velocitudeinal equilibrium.” She’s not a genius, but she’s smarter than average and surprisingly well read. Still, there’s part of her that thinks people (boys) find brainy chicks offputting so she doesn’t wear her education on her sleeve much. She’s still young though so she’ll probably outgrow that eventually, especially hanging around with all the other capable women on the team.
The Renegade X books (one and two) are among my favorite superhero novel series, up there with Wearing the Cape and D-List Supervillain, and the author, Chelsea Campbell, is running a kickstarter in advance of the third book coming out. It doesn’t cost much (as far as I’m aware) to publish an e-book through Amazon, but kickstarters for books like this are cool cause they allow for hardback versions but more importantly, they’re so they can afford to pay artists for cover art. Otherwise you wind up with covers done in Poser with Microsoft Word wordart for the title. There are some god damned dire covers if you go looking through the dregs of e-books. Like unbelievably bad. I’m sure there’s a subreddit just for making finding and making fun of the worst ones.
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Larry Niven had conservation of momentum/energy with his teleport system. He used the effect in some of the stories, but otherwise it was out of the way because he had a technical solution to shunt the unwanted energy and momentum elsewhere.
The best part of drop kicking like that, is if you drop kick right, a normal human being wouldn’t likely break, we actually had a similar discussion in a medical class of mine (love being a med student during those times), we eventually all agreed (that we totally derailed the teacher) that if you kept velocity during teleportation, you would have to drop kick or break whatever other body part your using (unless your the dude with a pelvis of steel? that was another conversation…sometimes I need to keep my mouth shut lol, I’m learning ^^) unless you were more frail than an average human being, and we decided don’t go terminal velocity and beyond (otherwise known as to infinity and beyond)…you might kill the other guy, but you might kill yourself too no matter where you hit.
The face might not be the best place to deliver a dropkick, too many collapsible structures to cushion impact. Although it’s epic on the shock scale :D
I disagree, the neck is particularly weak, as are the bones in your face. it doesn’t take a comparably large force to kill/immobilize a person when striking face, whereas hitting the chest/stomach area may knock the wind out of them with only a chance to throw them off their feet as opposed to hitting them in the face and most likely knocking them off their feet. At high speeds striking the face with a drop kick will cause too much damage to an especially stable target of normal human build to withstand, probably needs an emphasis on normal. high speeds or not, the body is too dense naturally to do enough damage without also hurting yourself. Its just like fighting someone, generally you want to avoid wasting your own energy, body shots rarely make sense, and the body is far easier to defend anyways.
One thing that is not discussed is E=MCsquared. think of the total energy contained in something converted into energy. 2 grams converted into energy in the first nuclear weapon was 20KT. So the conversion of a human of about 82 Kg would yield around 1600 MT. The conversion of a 1000 pound conventional warhead would yield about 9091 MT.
Regarding dropkicks to the face: wearing combat boots really help with this. Aggressively ridged soles made out of unusually rigid Vibram and backed up with a steel antipuncture shank deliver the hit in a more devastating way than bare feet would, and good combat boots give you the ankle support to let more of the shock bypass your ankle and be absorbed by your more powerful knee. (why did you think combat boots are so tall? So that they basically serve as ankle wraps all the time.) So long as your knee is stronger than your opponent’s face, you have the edge.
Seedling: if your kick to the face collapses said collapsible structures, you win. That’s the idea, after all, to do damage not to deliver pushing force.
… Unicorn Butt Cops…
O.o
Not even going to ask how you found that one.
I wouldn’t ask Dave how he found it either, because that might also mean finding out what he was actually looking for at the time…
8-/
One other thing to think of about Trek transporters. If they do destroy the original and then assemble a new copy at the destination, then they will need the raw materials available to build with. The most likely source for the carbon, nitrogen, oxygen, calcium, phosphorus, etc. would be the recycled leftovers from the ship’s food service systems, and also what might be politely termed the ‘waste disposal’ systems.
So in Star Trek you literally are what you eat (and excrete).
Technically in Star trek, it’s supposed to be that they’re using energy to matter conversion, not material assimilation.
Then in next gen they start using related technology to make food, drink and even items from stored patterns, energy and elements (pretty sure they had to have some of the elements on hand anyway. At the very least the ones they described as difficult to replicate for… reasons… )
So while people were not being made out of leftovers or shite all those failed and partially failed beam ups (the ones where they were so close you could actually see the poor sod for a second) make me wonder if the reverse might have been sort of true. Unless they vented the extra energy/partially reconstituted matter into space out of respect then it had to go somewhere right?
TLDW (to long didn’t write). I never did figure out how teleportation doesn’t equal infinite energy via gaining potential energy in height. also if harem conserves momentum, what would happen to her if you teleported to the opposite side of the earth, would she be traveling at ~1km/second or mach 3, and if so, would she just be flattened by the ram air compression …… wait that would only happen if she teleported upside down (or objectively the same orientation) …. ok so what if she teleported from the equator to the pole of the earth, she would be traveling at 450m/s still supersonic, but I guess that might be survivable with harems super toughness when compacted to two people …. this is weird … but I like getting my nerd on :}
If you think about it, Teleporting transforms matter into energy, and reconstitutes it in another location bipassing normal space. Since energy has no real physical mass, when matter gets deconstructed the potential energy built up from that would also be deconstructed.
So falling from high distances, would be gotten rid of when they leave normal space through whatever n-space teleporters pass through when going from point a to b.
As for Portals. I can get that, since the n-space teleporters go through. would be linked so that passage would have less of an impact on transportation. Since it’s linked space, rather than breaking down and reconstitution of matter.
Still, it’s cool that Harem’s teleportation. keeps her matter’s build up of potential / kinetic energy. Rather than it getting broken down when her physical body breaks down and reforms.
*bypassing
I had to nit-pick. Of course energy has mass. In fact, the formula for converting the two is quite famous: E=mc^2.
Shachar
That’s been disproven. And Einstein said that it’s only an equation for an observer, oberserving momentum. It’s not the mass of the object itself. So no energy has no actual mass. As in Plasma, Protons, Neutrons, the like. Only when energy is structured together to form physical matter does it have mass.
Einstein’s theory was for and I quote”The equation Einstein came up with more than a century ago can be considered a degenerate form of the mass-energy-momentum relation for vanishing momentum.
Read more: https://www.science20.com/hammock_physicist/whats_wrong_emc2 ”
Technically it can exert force / magnetic fluxes. And are measured in Maxwells, Guass, Webers, and Teslas. But actual energy, not physical matter. Doesn’t conserve physical momentum built up by physical objects. Which is something that is bound to things with mass (In terms of velocity, potential / kinetic energy, and inertia). So you’re wrong, there is no energy has no mass. At least not electromagnetic Energy. And especially, not one that deconstructs itself so that it has no physical mass, and bypasses the speed of light limit that has been already disproven. Then restructures itself Into physical mass (Passing through n-space. Rather than physical space).
Energy / photons have no rest mass, not no mass. There’s a difference. Otherwise light would ignore gravitational fields, which it demonstrably does not.
My keeping track of the momentum and velocity of her overall body she also keeps track of the momentum and velocity of her blood and nerve impulse flow. Canceling out the momentum of the fall equally over every atom would be a lot harder than conserving it.
Not if she for a short time has no physical body. Which is why Isay her power is amusing. Since when teleporting. You don’t keep track of everything, rather you’re physical body is deconstructed to raw energy that bypasses normal space. Without a physical body. There is no potential, or kinetic energy to conserve.
Since momentum, and impacts, and inertia are tied to physical mass interacting with other physical masses.
Not particles interacting with other particles through n-space. Or even subspace.
Since teleportation is the breaking down, and reformation of matter in different areas at a near instant. The mass of momentum from falling would disappated from the original, and would break down between n-space.
Now Portals, and people catching things at a free fall. That’s a different story. Since unlike teleporting. Portals don’t break down matter into raw energy, to matter again. It’s a linked space, so when something enters. Other potential slowing of an object passing through n-space. It wouldn’t be enough to disapate velocity in the original body. Thus splat.
As for physical objects like Spidey Webs and S-Man catches.
That’s physical objects interacting with other physical objects. Spiderman killed Gwen thanks to that, and noone wants to see all the people Superman killed by giving them their sudden stop early (to a body capable of hitting something with more mass than the earth Itself has).
But teleporters. That’s an entirely different ball game, and there is no conservation of energy, no transfer of momentum to be carried over when doing that. But then again Harem being quantumly entangled, could possibly undo actual physics. To carry over momentum rather than it being undone when her body gets unmade.
Some time ago, having only basic logic rather than advanced science knowledge to bring to bear, I tried to make an argument about the nature of her copying a clone bodies information before breaking it down into energy making it possible to either ignore or alter the momentum (I’ve come up with something better, similar but more complex, then my first stab since then this is just so you know what RobK was responding to) forces directly. Rob had this to say.
“RobK April 9, 2015 at 6:26 pm
That’s the problem though.
Momentum is an actual physical characterisitic of the atoms/molecules that make up your body. So on that explanation, the information stored would also contain that momentum”
Which I took to mean that Harem would have to be a being (possibly a being connected to parts of itself kept not in the world we know and can measure at this time) capable of doing enough math to alter the base information she had copied to match needed momentum of objects at the target location and adding or subtracting the energy needed for that information to form the matter with the needed properties on the other end.
Are you saying RobK was wrong? That a copy of all the information available in the original clone body before destroying it would not include momentum as a part of that mass’s information?
And as a question related to you saying all momentum would be negated: Wouldn’t she reform at the target site at a universe level Dead Stop with everything else moving relative to her at incredible speeds?
You probably won’t see this as it is late but I was curious about what you would say so I took a chance.
Yes he was.
Since momentum isn’t stored in atoms. Potential Energy (which in turn gives way to Kinetic Energy) isn’t stored in molecules or atoms. It’s a virutal force built up by the mass of an object falling / moving, and the potential energy being tranfered via inertia into what it strikes.
If it lacks the nescessary force to break it, the force kind of doubles back and “rebounds” into the instigator (the falling object) and that’s what causes it to break / suffer G’s of impact.
For instance, if you stand at the top of a building and drop a bowling ball, and a pillow. The pillow will leave no damage / take no damage (In normal circumstances), while the Bowling Ball will land with a rather solid thud, and depending on what it lands on can do damage.
The same as with a body. Since it has a physical mass, thus it can store potential energy. And transfer it.
Now teleporting, breaks up mass into pure energy, and breaks it down. Since the falling object (the one that is building up potential energy) is no longer. That force get’s Undone as well. Since Atoms can’t store potential energy. And when being remade, it’s technically a new body as atoms from the surrounding are realigned to reform the body.
But yes, Physical Mass stores that type of energy. Raw Energy and atoms do not. Well not unless the person is stupid enough to teleport into a particle accelorator when it’s on, then the raw energy that would normally reform (thus weak to strong Electromagnetic forces) would be prevented from being reformed and whatever happens to the individual atoms that make up that intermediary form getting blasted into each other.
Then you have to take into account that they are literally bypassing normal space When becoming undone / reforming, so the energy itself isn’t transfered since there is no physical medium to transfer to. That’s not taking into account going from electrons, ambient atoms, and other forces that make the body, but the energy loss from the binding energy of atoms being arranged to reconstitute all the mollecules that make up the body.
Potential Energy becomes Kinetic when work is transfered from one body to another object. Without a body there is no Potential Energy, thus no Kinetic Energy to be generated. Since Body A, that was affected. Is no longer there to store / convert Potential to Kinetic Energy. Well unless Body B is still falling which then the PE to KE is reset as Body B falls (Albiet at a different rate).
Oh! Another interesting fact(s)
https://education.jlab.org/qa/atomicstructure_10.html [Atoms are 99.99r% empty space], all physical mass is basically levitating in an electrostatic field.
Without that empty space an average person would be basically a mable (the game kind, not the building substance).
So there wouldn’t be enough actual atoms to carry over, nor store momentum of a falling body via teleportation.
Yeah but blood moving through your veins also has momentum and velocity. If that isn’t conserved then every time you teleport all your blood would stop and you’d have to start your heart.
What keeps blood moving is pressure. The biggest source of which is the heart contracting and pumping the blood. Whilst movement does involve momentum, the counteracting forces, within a body are large. There is a lot of friction, from the walls of blood vessels, for example. As such, without the constant application of new pressure, to keep it moving, blood will rapidly stop. So the blood’s own momentum is not the biggest factor in the circulatory system.
This is why even recently dead bodies do not bleed. People often think it is because of coagulation, but that takes a while to set in. Rather it is because of the lack of pressure, from the beating heart. So only the blood which is directly exposed by an open wound will leak out, but very little from the arteries and veins connected to it.
So, for a teleporter, even if all their blood came to a dead stop, when they ported, provided their heart was still working, they should be able to get it going again.
What it would do though is put extra strain on the heart. As you say the blood is normally still moving, even when near the end of the heart’s pumping cycle (when it is at its most relaxed), so all that is required is speeding it up, rather than getting it going from scratch.
So if a teleporter does have this effect, each time, then they would be advised not to do too many rapid ports, of the kind we saw Jiggawatt make, in order to cross the city, to reach the big fight.
Dave, I’m only mentioning this because you seem to enjoy the nit picking.
When someone falls they are in free fall, aka zero G. As such, Harem’s shirt should not roll up only because she is upside down. The wind might do it, but not gravity (which get cancelled out by acceleration).
If it is the wind, then it should happen also as Harem falls downwards. It’s the same wind, for the same reason (and the same effective gravity).
As a side note, I noticed that when Sydney is flying, everything on her (hair, badge she is wearing around her neck etc.) flies with her. If she’s upside down, everything falls upwards. I’m wondering whether you invested any thought in how much that effect extends outwards (i.e. – why is Sydney’s ponytail and poster tube bound by this, but not Harem?).
Shachar
Most probable reason is it is a close body effect, i.e. it effects her body and any “small” items she is in contact with.
She’s not in freefall, she’s still accelerating, and the inertia of her jacket is going to be different from the inertia of the rest of her.
The only thing that causes her to accelerate is gravity. When that’s the case, it is called “free fall”. Gravity and acceleration cancel each other out, resulting in you, and everything that falls with you, to be in relative zero G.
In fact, the only thing the would seem like acceleration at all is the air resistance. That would apply force in the opposite direction to the direction you move in, which in Harem’s case is “up” (i.e. – toward her head), both before and after she flips.
I see your argument, but I think your explanation is a bit confusing the way it’s worded; I take it that you are referring to the physics equations when you say “cancel each other out”. Lemme take a shot at it:
First, set aside air resistance for a moment and imagine this problem in a vacuum, with only gravity as a factor (e.g. on the moon).
The thing about gravity is that, given the same source (a planet, for example), it accelerates (not to be confused with exerts force on) all matter equally as a function of distance from the source, irrespective of the masses of any objects being acted upon. This is the basis behind the experiment of dropping a bowling ball and a feather on the moon; without an atmosphere, if dropped from the same height, both will hit the ground at the same time, discrepant masses (and inertiae) notwithstanding. By the same token, were Harem performing her tele-acrobatics on the moon, her clothes would remain unruffled, regardless of the direction she decided to orient herself, since she and her clothes, always being essentially the same distance from the planet, would be subject to identical accelerations.
Air resistance, on the other hand, clearly exerts more of an effect on clothing than one’s body, being a function of aerodynamics, exposed area, and several other complications. However, as the term would suggest, it always resists movement relative to the air in question, so assuming, as depicted, that Harem is always moving feet first through the air (and not gliding through a convenient updraft or downdraft), air resistance will always be trying to wedgie on her undergarments and rip off her overgarments, again regardless of her orientation relative to any nearby planets.
By this reasoning, there should be no difference between her garments’ behavior on her descent and subsequent ascent; if air resistance saw fit to expose her belly button, it should have already been visible on the way down.
Except she is not falling in vacuum, is she?
There is still drag from the air around, and at the moment she is depicted she is travelling up.
The problem is she’s depicted falling down in panel 3 before she falls up, and as pointed out above, air resistance should have been trying to claw off her top on the way down as well as the way up, so her midriff should already have been visible then.
But… But… But Daphne said “conservation of momentum”, yet what she does is not that. Conservation of momentum means the speed vector is conserved. This means the velocity and the direction of motion are conserved.
“Reorienting” means changing the speed vector. This change means an instant speed modification, or acceleration. Instant acceleration to a non-zero mass requires infinite force.
It’s a neat mechanism, though. But alas, instant infinite acceleration without organ splattering is difficult. Not that it stops the Star Trek writers, since this is exactly what the ST transporter is doing.
At least you worry about it and mention it, whereas most SF does not. So kudos to you.
Actually it’s not. What the SF transporters are doing are breaking a person down into energy, and spewing out a copy out at the other end. So there is no acceleration to take into consideration.
Which is good when you think that you are taking an obect from one spot in an ever moving, and expanding universe, to another spot. Where there’s space ships, planets / satalites rotating all over the place, suns exerting gravitational pull. If they carried all that over. It’d be instant death.
No what’s scarry about Teleportation is this:
https://www.cracked.com/article_19626_6-realities-teleportation-star-trek-didnt-warn-us-about_p6.html
Not only are you breaking down trillions of additional lifeforms that live on and in your body that need to be recreated accurrately. But your body gets disintigrated, streamed as raw energy, and if not done right can release a solar system destroying nuklear explosion. And that’s not taking into consideration of misinformation being taken in, multiple bodies with similar / same names getting pulled and reformated together, or signal interference. Accelleration while not a problem, Appocalyptic Explosions or Signal Interferance are what really need to be worried about with science based teleportation.
Read part 1 – 6. Sorry, sent out the wrong link.
https://www.cracked.com/article_19626_6-realities-teleportation-star-trek-didnt-warn-us-about.html
The idea that a teleportation machine could somehow identify which atoms it is sending constitute you and which constitute something else and get mixed up about it is absurd, all it does is send information about which atoms are where inside the teleportation area and rebuild them at the other end. If a fly or bacteria or whatever was in a specific spot at the start it will be in the same spot when you are finished. As for all the other problems, they are problems to do with a set of physics that is completely different than the ones governing the world we actually live in. The only type of true teleportation that could actually work is quantum teleportation, which has no issues with signal noise and no possibility of creating duplicates. Finally, any ethical issues about “killing the original and creating a clone” are meaningless, people are made of information not atoms, and which atoms actually store that information changes constantly as we eat and drink. Teleporting just involves changing all the atoms at once. It is very likely that quantum teleportation will never be able to work for something as complex as humans, but if someone ever does make it work the issues involved will have nothing to do with those listed in the cracked article.
It is correct that momentum is not conserved. It is a vector phenomenon and both magnitude and direction matter. Though it is true that kinetic energy is conserved.
Her explanation implies, however, that she can switch reference frames at will. Pretty sure that isn’t allowed, but is the sort of cool cheat that “super” powers might allow?
What you’re forgetting, of course, is that the lack of conservation of momentum in Star Trek transporters is handily solved by the “SHUT UP! O_O” compensators, which are tied into the plot armour and “LOOK OVER THERE!!” generators to form an impenetrable field of forgiveness..
The problem that I find with most critiques of super powers is that they are predicated on words and only words. That is to say that the complaint is that “so and so can teleport” and since that is the stated power, they must have problems with conservation of energy and so on. It strikes me, though, that super powers all come in suites; the Flash, for example, does not just have the power to run really fast—if that were the case, he’d be dead—he has the power to run really fast, the power to have his clothes survive the acceleration, the power to survive the acceleration, the power to survive sudden changes in vector, and so on.
Similarly, teleporters clearly have some sort of energy dump. Perhaps it gets dispersed as heat, perhaps it just gets dispersed as heat in the sun, perhaps it’s just disbursed by their powers in such a way that it destroys the indestructible energy—another thing worth noting is that because we say something is a rule does not make it so; while physics is clearly functional and follows rules that are inviolable, it does not follow that we humans actually know what they are and so it’s a bit presumptuous of us to say that the energy can’t be dumped somehow that we don’t understand. Also, super powers.
All that said, I love how Dave has done powers. They’re a blast when they play along with the rules as we understand them. Seriously, awesome stuff. And best was the description of how to properly fight in a super-battle. Keep up the good work, rant over.
Thanks. :)
I noticed that dropkick!Harem is wearing Jabberwokky’s outfit- and, in turn, that Jabberwokky was introduced with a note about how she was originally part of ARCSwat before being bumped for the new version of Harem. Neat callback there. :-)
A very similar feel to the outfits, although not actually matching. But quite likely that they shop in the same places. :)
Why are most people assuming that Harem’s teleportation works by matter deconstruction and reconstitution? It’s not the only option. She could be quantum-teleporting all her atoms in synch. In fact, given that her brains are quantum-entangled, I think that’s a more likely method!
Thinking with portals… or teleportation at least.
I think this might be the first time I actually understood what was going on here. That’s so cool! I am continuously impressed by all the applications Harem’s powers have — and that you think of them.
Yeah, she could cheat at the Test Your Strength game… mostly because it has been mentioned earlier that, when only one of her is “un-teleported”, that body is twelve times as strong as any individual body when all five are running around.
RIDER KICK!
I’ve seen some lambs explode in a fiery death due to farting.
You really should not have been lighting your farts that close to innocent lambs!
In Wak-fu the main hero uses portals for effects much like Harem does.
Harem’s power is cool and all, but how did Sydney get her ponytail to stay in place upside-down?
It is not the first time that has happened. Check Halo out any time her orientation is not upright when flying. The Flyball is rather a misnomer as it appears to either control gravity or (as sometimes it does things which should not be possible regardless of what direction gravity is pointing, or how strong) possibly both that and inertia.
Although it may be grander yet and, as both of those are pretty fundamental properties. So possibly it completely sets localised universal conditions for Halo, as may be convenient to her.
However it is done though, down is always towards Sydney’s feet, in situations like this. So that is the direction her hair hangs.
Also, transporters completely deconstruct the subject atom by atom and then move them elsewhere, it’s not a teleport or a wormhole. The reformation puts everything back in place, kaboom, no momentum to preserve.
I thought canon was that Harem teleported ‘instantaneously’; not at the speed of energy or light, nor at the speed of moving through a portal. So the entire field surrounding her when she teleports must be the portal, which she occupies at both ends simultaneously at the time of teleport. This would be consistent with the abilities she’s demonstrated so far.
Question tho: if she reclaims a dupe, does she gain the mass, and therefore density? That should multiply the momentum as well. And would that apply to her clothes? For example if two dupes wearing steel-toed tank boots recombined, would their drop kick force be multiplied by material and density? What if two dupes wore stiletto heels? Or steel-toed boots with stiletto heels?
Harem is thinking with Portals.
That doesn’t actually conservate momentum, since she starts with zero and creates it by teleporting unless she’s using her basic momentum for the earth, which would mean that walking up heights will get really tough and she will never be allowed to fly with anything again until she has thrown into the air.
Star trek teleporters arent actually teleporters. They dont move matter/energy from place to place. They scan (and destroy) the original, saving an exact copy of the full energy pattern in the HUGE (think on the scale of petabytes) storage database in the teleporter computer, then use replicator technology to recreate the matter of the energy pattern at the platform. Its why you can get clones and whatnot with it if it fucks up because its just an energy pattern stored in the database…. if you dont clear the cache you can make as many clones as you possibly want!
…I think I remember that villain in the final panel, from the Suicide Squad movie (2nd one, I think?)