No. Instantaneous transmission of matter wasn't magic. It had always been a part of folklore as teleportation, but just as machines had been made to duplicate the legendary feats of human extrasensory perception, machines made to let men speak over great distances to duplicate the strange voices of mystics, and machines made that would indeed show strange visions over vast expanses, science had made the Transmatter for null-time object displacement.
Transmatters were a logical, progressive theoretical implementation. If electrical impulses could recreate patterns first in sound, then in light, it followed relentlessly that someday some form of impulses would be found to recreate matter. Energy and matter were only different forms of one unity.
Fortunately, matter duplication had come before matter transmission. As the researches of Phillips established, an exact duplicate is not the original.
A duplication of a man is only a duplicate, not the original, unless the elan vital, the spirit, the soul, is transmitted, for it cannot be duplicated. A duplicated man is a perfect robot, capable of memory and learning, and developing into a human being in time. But it is not a human being immediately, and it can never become the original of the duplicate. Every human viewpoint is unique and irreplaceable.
Duplication of matter was uneconomical. The power outlay was too great, the equipment too costly to build and operate. So transportation by transmission was investigated. Again, it was too expensive except for very great distances, trips of light-years to worlds established over the generations by the spaceships which had reached virtual light-speed and could not go beyond it.
Personalities of transmittees got lost among the stars.
Transmitted poets arrived with a dim itch for a brutal fight, due to some residue of glandular acid from a parting insult affecting their birth trauma on the new world.
Great conductors solidified, hating music.
Competent engineers were imported with an infantile urge toward lyric verse.