Geek Musings

I'm about to get really nerdy on you, so send the kids out of the room.
   I was just watching a bit of STNG* and one of the characters was holding a candleholder with a lit candle in it. There was some talk about taking it back up to the ship** and the scene continued. But my attention didn't go with them.
   I was wondering what would happen if one of those characters tried to use the transporter while carrying an open flame.
   We can indulge our willing suspension of disbelief and admit the existence of a transporter, which disassembles things - rocks, fences, people - on a sub-atomic level, moves those sub-atomic particles from one place to another, and then reassembles them into a perfect duplicate of the original. It takes matter from one location and puts it instantaneously into another location.
   But fire isn't matter, it's energy. So how would the transporter work? There's no material to get ahold of, nothing there to disassemble that could be reassembled somewhere else. I'm thinking the process would just extinguish the candle. Or blow up in a massive explosion. Or rip a hole in the space-time continuum that only Wesley Crusher could fix.
   This is the kind of stuff that would occupy my mind all the time if I let it. Which I don't. Mostly.

   I got a few more questions along those lines:
   If a lightsaber is made of light (duh), how does it come to a point instead of scattering like a flashlight?
   If warp drives really worked, why would it take any time at all to get from point A to point B? Wouldn't the engines just warp space-time and make point A right next to point B and the ship would move across like walking through a doorway?
   If future Earth is populated by intelligent apes, why have they given up their feces-flinging ways? Wouldn't that become their football? Wouldn't they have a Super Feces-Flinging Bowl?
   If someone invented time travel, wouldn't there almost instantaneously be millions of time travelers invading every moment in time?


* that Star Trek the Next Generation for the uninitiated
** that's the Enterprise, NCC 1701-D