In some stories, these kinds of machines can even change living things, including people. Enter the Matter Replicator, a form of Applied Phlebotinum that gleefully ignores the laws of thermodynamics as it rearranges and reassembles matter at the nuclear level to do everything from fixing a radio to fixing a nice cup of Earl Grey. Works of Speculative Fiction like to take that "if" and make it a reality. Turning an ore-rich mountainside into next year's model of automobile or a tree farm into enough copies of Time magazine to fill everyone's subscriptions takes a lot of time and energy wouldn't it be better if you could just take a big pile of stuff, break it down into the very building blocks of matter and reconstruct it into all those wonderful big complex things? Those of us who want to build things faster find them a nuisance. Those of us who like to sleep at night find security in those rules. If you've ever worried about spontaneously transforming into a giant pile of cherry ice cream while sitting at your keyboard, relax: the odds of such an event happening are vanishingly slim, as are the odds of your keyboard transforming into a nest of live pythons, or the ceiling over your head turning into cheddar cheese and falling on you. Matter operates under certain rules that say that things (barring certain radioactive elements) don't spontaneously transform from one thing to another. Captain Jean Luc Picard, Star Trek: The Next Generation
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