NOTES
Here’s a thought experiment for students. What if teleportation were possible, but the laws of conservation of energy and momentum still applied. Niven played with this idea in his “Flash Crowd” stories – a change in altitude requires causes of gain or loss of potential energy, which translates into heat gain or loss. Transfer to a different latitude or longitude results in a problem because the object being teleported retains the velocity it has due to the Earth’s motion at the location it’s teleporting from – which could mean being slammed into the wall at dozens of miles per hour at the new location (see http://groups.msn.com/AndysUsingScienceFictionForEducationPage/studyguid... for some calculations).