How they are looking at it now isn’t really practical though. It’s really more of a destructive copy. The original would have to be destroyed just to find all of the states of the particles (Heisenberg uncertainty principle). Then the states of the particles, not the particles, would have to be digitized and processed as a unit (wow computing power). You would also need to have prepositioned entangled particles at both sides to use as a transport mechanism (Einstein-Podolsky-Rosen entanglement) so you can’t just jump anywhere; you have to ship a box full of the same number of particles to point B before you can jump. Then you reverse the whole thing on the other side. Not really practical.
What they need to look at is the way that particles interact when they become entangled. How do they communicate their states? When one changes why does the other change? If you can understand how and why the particles communicate AFTER they become entangled, maybe we can recreate it. At that point you would still have the problems of destruction and digitization but you wouldn’t have to preposition particles. You could just tell block of matter at point B to look like block of matter at point A. The problem with focusing on the creation of the entanglement is that the particles must be created in the same physical location. Where is the teleportation fun in that?
While it would take crazy amounts of energy to do, you could also create the block of matter at B as far away as you can focus the particles from the energy emitter. That way you could go anywhere the particles could penetrate (space to surface depending on atmospheric characteristics). You would still need to use entanglement at the remote location to normalize the matter that would be available. When you are trying to turn a rock into a person you wouldn’t have to worry about what elements are there if you are working on a particle level. Computers will get there but we need to solve the energy problem somehow.
So why do I want teleportation? Because I keep finding really cool people that are over a thousand miles away and I want a fast way to visit.
