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How Pokéballs Work in My Books

So this is something I've spent a lot of time thinking about, and I've realized that my books don't have the full explanation that I've worked out (and probably never will because it would interrupt the story needlessly for a long, boring lecture). So, for anyone who's curious, here it is.

I'll start by saying that I came up with this on my own after doing as much research as I could. I got some ideas from a theoretical article on Bulbapedia, but I also added quite a lot of my original ideas from watching/reading sci-fi and from being an actual computer programmer.

So my explanation, like any good sci-fi, is based on a little bit of science. I'm talking about the law of conservation of mass-energy, which says that the total amount of mass and energy in a system always stays the same. The law of conservation of mass says that mass can't be created or destroyed. The law of conservation of energy says that energy can't be created or destroyed, but mass can be turned into energy and energy can be turned into mass. The conversion of mass into energy is shown by Einstein's famous formula E = mc^2. M is the mass, and E is the energy.

What this means for Pokémon is that you can't take a big Pokémon with a lot of mass and shrink it down into a mini version with less mass inside a pokéball. That would be destroying mass. The leftover mass that didn't make it into the mini version would have to have been conserved by turning into energy. And then you would need that same amount of energy to be transformed back into mass in order to bring the Pokémon back to its full size form. So that energy would need to be stored.

Hey, as long as we're storing energy, doesn't it make much more sense to store the whole Pokémon as energy? It would be less complicated and also means that we don't have to worry about that mini version of the Pokémon being physically comfortable inside the pokéball.

That's just how it works in my books.  The pokéball works by transforming the physical body of the Pokémon into energy, which it then stores inside wires and circuits, similar to electricity. So the inside of a pokéball is just a bunch of wires for storing energy, the machine that does the energy/matter transformation, and a bunch of scanners and sensors.

One these is a motion sensor, which an empty pokéball uses to tell when it's being thrown at a Pokémon. It then triggers a program to try to capture the Pokémon it touches. It also has scanners all over its surface to get a reading of the thing it touches. It takes a tiny bit of fur or skin and reads the DNA. This is used to confirm that, first of all,  it actually hit a Pokémon. We wouldn't want a pokéball to suck in a person, for example. Secondly, this will be important if the Pokémon is captured, so it stores the DNA pattern.

Next, it starts the process of converting matter to energy, which also involves running a detailed scan of every part of the Pokémon to make a kind of blueprint of what it looks like, what it's body is made of, etc. The blueprint gets stored in memory and the energy gets stored in the circuits. If the capture fails, the pokéball uses the blueprint and the DNA pattern to transform the energy back into exactly the right kinds of molecules arranged in exactly the right places, which demonstrates some pretty dang impressive computational power. Not to mention the tremendous capacity for energy storage, considering that the "c" in E = mc^2 is the speed of light, which is such a gigantic multiplier that I think even "gigantic" doesn't quite cover it. Basically, these things are powerhouses far beyond our own technological abilities.

If the capture is successful, the pokéball stores the energy, the blueprint, and the DNA pattern indefinitely. The next time something touches the pokéball, it also gets a DNA scan. If the DNA is human, the fingerprint scanners on the surface activate. They scan and store the trainer's fingerprints so that trainer only is registered as the owner. It doesn't do a DNA scan every time because fingerprints are just as unique and a fingerprint scan takes a lot less energy. Even we in the real world have fingerprint scanners, so you know it can't be as mega-advanced as on-the-spot DNA scanning.