I've read accounts of the experiments into teleportation also. If I recall correctly, one article said that they were working on getting it to teleport a single atom and that if they could accomplish that, the only obstacle would be the computer power required to teleport something.
As for the methods involved, the idea of creating a copy and destroying the original has been used several times. It was at the heart of the book Waystation by Clifford Simak and it was used in an episode of the new Outer Limits. I've always thought that if it worked this way, *YOU* wouldn't actually go anywhere, it would create a copy of you somewhere else and you'd die.
>This makes me recall an old Black-and-white movie about some guy who goes
>back to kill Hitler
I agree with ulthar, I think this is one of the hour-long Twilight Zone episodes,
No Time Like the Past Finally, I also liked the story The Jaunt. The part that gets me is trying to imagine what it would be like to be awake through such a trip where you would experience millions of years worth of limbo. The scary part is that seems like something I'd do.
