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Far-Fetched Time Travel Concept Receives Private Funds
WED Fan writes "A University of Washington researcher who couldn't find funds the old fashioned way has raised funds from private parties to continue with his studies of 'time travel'. He is studying the Einstein-Podolsky-Rosen Paradox. Basically, using spooky action, he wants to be able to use entangled pairs to send messages, not only through space, but also in time. 'As the evidence for this has accumulated, several fairly contorted and unsatisfying efforts have been aimed at solving the puzzle. Cramer has proposed an explanation that doesn't violate the speed of light but does kind of mess with the traditional concept of time.' Despite the implausibility of the science here laypeople have been inspired by the researcher's idea, enough to donate almost $35,000 to his project."
Can I get the investors info?
I have a bridge that...
In soviet Russia Time Travel You.
Is this the Lt. Commander Data theory or the Spock theory of time travel?
if you do manage to do this, send me a copy of all the sports results for the next 100 years and history of the stocks, etc.
Seriously.. If this was possible, i can only start to imagine how the wrong people or even the right people could really mess up things with their first little test.
s/©//g
Its not that far fetched.
I invested some money in this guy next week and have been earning a decent return on my investment for the last 3 years.
I did however feel a little shiver as I considered shorting his stock and for some damned reason pictures of my family have started to fade.
liqbase
he wants to be able to use entangled pairs to send messages, not only through space, but also in time.
Big deal, Slashdot has been bringing us news from the past for years!
Trolling is a art,
People assume that time is a strict progression of cause to effect, but, actually, from a non-linear viewpoint, it's more like a big ball of wibbly-wobbly timey-wimey stuff.
Wooo it works!!!
Do not try to read the dupe, thats impossible. Instead, only try to realize the truth
What truth?
There is no dupe
But I also admire folks who can inspire others toward some dream...
"We think people rightly feel that once they buy something, it stays bought," --Suw Charman, Open Rights Grp
If time travel can be produced, it's worth (asymptotically) nearly any amount of investmemnt to get it.
--
make install -not war
If I ever start thinking about building a time machine, I would make a promise to myself beforehand that my first plan of action is to send a message back in time to right now telling me that it works. I'm still waiting for that message.
...then it's all over for Powerball. [I hate the minimum time between Reply/Submit]
how many times must it be explained, you cannot send information FTL using quantum entanglement. more specifically, you cannot send information using quantum entanglement. you can only use it together with a classical communication channel.
you'd think these people wouldve already known that.
If something is so important that you feel the need to post it on the internet... It probably isn't that important.
Have them fund themselves. They can go back to the 60's and invest in Intel.
Table-ized A.I.
The story is really just,
;-)
"Another investor rooked into making a stupid investment through investment pitch X."
Individuals invest in stupid things all the time. Like workers who just read Slashdot all day.
Apology to Ubuntu forum.
My project consists of sending messages back in time. Although this is proving very expensive to accomplish at this moment, I'll pay you off as soon as I send back the first winning set of Powerball numbers from the future. Please send money to me now. Because of past banking "misunderstandings", cheques are best made out to Cash. Thank you!
Sincerely,
R. U. Stupid
"It's the height of ridiculousness to say for those 9 lines you get hundreds of millions."
I mean, you can't count Mail Server Lag as sending messages into the future.... Right?
I wonder if there's a way to get the names of the people who gave him money, and their contact info.
"We are all geniuses when we dream"
- E.M. Cioran
I thought you said NOT to cross the streams!
Of course, the past impoverished researcher would have to build a receiver first, requiring funds up front. Maybe that's what he's doing now. Keep an eye on how this guy's "luck" goes in the, um, future.
Have you read my blog lately?
If relativity is correct (and even possibly if it isn't), backwards-in-time communication really REALLY F@#)(*s up causality. Heck, Faster Than Light (FTL) communication at all F@#)(*s up causality.
The EPR paradox, in particular, can't actually communicate information, as you can't actually tell which of the two sides measured it first (or at all), preventing FTL communication and saving causality. (Of course, simultinaity doesn't make sense either, thanks to relativity, but causality does).
This guy sounds like a good snake-oil salesman.
Test your net with Netalyzr
Time is used, it cannot be reused. Is the Universe expanding into nothing or is it expanding into time (existence itself)?
Can Ziggy help?
I wonder if investors' safety is guaranteed.
Slashdot Burying Stories About Slashdot Media Owned
Isn't the basic premise that if sending messages back to the past is possible, we'd have received some by now? Seems like that's the same type of premise w/SETI as well. If there was intelligent life somewhere in the galaxy, we'd have already picked up the messages, unless of course, we're already the most advanced life forms.
Taking guns away from the 99% gives the 1% 100% of the power.
I've wondered why so few seem to pay attention to his ideas. He has offered the only explanation for the weirdness of quantum mechanics that makes any sense to me. See http://laputan.blogspot.com/2003_09_21_laputan_arc hive.html for Carver Mead's take on it.
Fred
OK, he doesn't seem QUITE so loony. But I remember seeing some nice proofs how EPR doesn't violate causality, because it can't transmit classical information.
But I don't remember how those proofs work, because quantum gives me a headache.
Test your net with Netalyzr
Why don't they just get the money from under the book on the shelf where they're going to put it once they've made megabucks?
Business plan:
Profit!
???
Invent time travel
Tell them to go back to the late seventies and tell them that the 8086 architecture is too simple and must be radically complexicated. Oh, they've already done that.
I find the idea of public funded science research heart warming. No need for the government or the science establishment to get involved. If an individual wants to contribute good for him and the researcher.
I care not if I think the researcher is not all there, it's not my money.
For instance Robert Bussard is trying to raise funds to continue his fusion research. Now I don't think he spent money wisely in the past, I don't think he was too smart in his dealings with the DoD, I do not think he has solved all the problem. But I do think he is the closest to cheap fusion. Should I fund him?
My only stipulation is that everything must be published, not only the research but also the money trail. I want to see where the dork spent $10k on software.
Well, that depends on your definition of "time"
Prov 9:8 Do not rebuke mockers or they will hate you; rebuke the wise and they will love you.
Not every crackpot is really a brilliant genius... but almost all brilliant geniuses were, at one point, considered to be crackpots.
I'm thinking the local pub will receive about $35,000 in funding over the next year or so...
...what did he need the money for again?
oh, right - to travel into the future - 30 seconds a time I bet.
The answer is 47 ..
davecb5620@gmail.com
and said don't bother. Zombie-robot Microsoft President-for-Life Ballmer stuns the world of 2021 that he indeed owns the patents for time travel (both Windows and Linux versions).
Instead my future self tells me that I am very wealthy because I [will] license my genome to some guy named Palpatine...
His research actually works! And the prof for it is this first post which was posted yesterday BEFORE this article showed up on /.
Karma stuck at 50? Add 2-5 inches.. err.. 2-5x Karmas Count to your pen1es.. err.. Karma all naturally and private
...has deemed time travel impossible.
This guy isn't crazy, the idea of using advanced waves goes all the way back to Feynman (see Wheeler-Feynman absorber theory which is what this is based upon). This merely another interpretation of Quantum Mechanics. All he's trying to do is see if we can experimentally verify it as producing different results than the "standard" interpretations. It's called science people, look into it. Sometimes crazy ideas turn out to be true, you don't know until, you know, you run experiments. As crazy ideas go, this one isn't that off the wall, it's based on actual physics. There's no FTL involved, the transactions all occur at the speed of light through advanced and retarded waves.
/ ti_over.html_ toc.htmlo de2.html
http://www.npl.washington.edu/npl/int_rep/ti_over
http://www.npl.washington.edu/npl/int_rep/tiqm/TI
http://www.npl.washington.edu/npl/int_rep/dtime/n
if it were, people from the far far far future would have traveled and we would have known about. Or it is possible that during the time time travel is invented people found that the time now and the past is so boring that no one wanted to visit
the Einstein-Rosen-Podolsky bridge doesn't allow time travel. It allows you to travel to parallel universes but at the SAME time as it is in your universe.
"For every 100 who join by yesterday, I'll donate $1 to time travel research"
http://osu.facebook.com/group.php?gid=2229376042
We all are time travelers and that clock on the wall is the speedometer...
Seriously though i doubt time travel is even possible, this guy is whacked...
Politics is Treachery, Religion is Brainwashing
It should arrive yesterday if this thing really works.
What you need to realize is that the underlying theory (entangled particles) permits the information to travel acress time, non the matter. In fact it permits the information a a particular particle "state" to trave trhough time. That's quite different from making phisical matter to decompose and appear in the future or in the past.
Apple iProduct. Non importa cosa sia, lo comprerete!
Time travel? Sheesh, the lengths some people will go to, to get the first comment on /.
then this is a great idea. It is not like you will be able to create a wormhole or anything, but maybe you could theoretically use it to send morse code to the future or past.
If he was successful in sending messages through time, we'd know about it already!
If this is the same thing as the Einstein-Podolsky-Rosen Bridge. Then they'll just end up bouncing from one slightly different earth to the next. And then they get to run into Kromags...
...since when did the federal government become sugar daddy to the university research world. Its crazy that we, as Americans, have come to accept the financing of every crackpot research project vis-a-vis the Federal Treasury. Why is it that every university in America finds it absolutely imperative to bankrupt the country on crazy ideas?
Why is it so remarkable that a scientist has to go to the private sector for money ?
"This country puts a lot more money into things that seem to me much crazier than this," said Mitch Rudman, a music industry executive in Las Vegas whose family foundation donated $20,000 to the experiment.
Oh no! This must be a conspiracy to allow RIAA hit-men to go back into time and take out the Internet before it was born.
Logically, the best way to make FTL communications is not to make them beat the speed of light per se, but to make them able to travel back in time so they APPEAR to be FTL when in fact the messages sent took far longer to get to their destination.
This would give us communication that appears to be FTL, but with the consequence that we still can't send organic materials back in time the same way ('cause they'd probably age ridiculously by the time they got there), AND it would get around the pesky paradoxes of traveling back in time since you're never sending anything later than what time it already currently is - The message is the only thing traveling back in time, in other words.
I did it, I did it!
-- Hiro
This is a different method of time travel using circulating light to bend space-time and create time loops.
Sounds like philotic theory from the Ender's Game series
How do you know they didn't?
Sure, it may seem like it's a foolish investment, but if it pays off... Oh, man... Invest a penny at the beginning at time, and before you know it, you'll be dining at Milliways.
- In the time between now and the time when existence as we know it is destroyed, time travel will never be invented. If it was, someone would come back in time to tell us about it.
- Time travel will be invented, but not used because it is too dangerous (hence why nobody ever came back in time to tell us about it). If this is the case, it is still useless and why invent it in the first place?
Either way, research in to time travel appears to me to be useless.Well, that's enough to get started...
"Oh boy! Are we going to try something dangerous?"
WANTED: Somebody to go back in time with me. This is not a joke. You'll get paid after we get back. Must bring your own weapons. Safety not guaranteed. I have only done this once before.
http://timetraveler.ytmnd.com/
Wow, the level of cynicism in this forum is shocking and laughable. Definitely, the result of the technological rhetoric through media, and ignorance that will not exist when (note the word) time travel becomes common place. Will this "technology" fall into the wrong hands? Will "bad" guys do bad things with this? I don't think so, as we would have evolved passed the baseless dependencies of governing defined morality (ergo laws) and the debilating need for money. Time travel will only exist within the subjects periphery. Go replay the winning lottery tickets, you'll win, but neither me or the silly audience here will know about it. Very simply, time travel (or the perception of) is but a label implied by our limited language and understanding of something we are already doing as you are reading this reply. Time travel is nothing more than the manipulation of energies. Consider E=MC2 if you can, without hurting your brain or ego. Albert Einstein was onto something, and so is this brave scientist. If I had a billion dollars to give to this man, I would in a heart beat. Nevertheless, I will be funding his endevour as best as I can. Laugh now, go fuel up on fossil, and vote for your next president, since no-one in this forum (myself included) will not live to see this ability (not discovery or invention) in the immediate future.
I actually met and got to speak to the guy behind the "philadelphia experiment" legend. Rather fascinating story as he told it but he was obviously starting to suffer from age related problems. I was at a lecture given by someone else and turned out to be sitting right next to the guy. After the lecture we hung around and talked for maybe 1/2 hour or so and I got the cliff notes version of the whole deal. Now I don't give it a ton of credence or anything, just it was a nice story told by an old geezer.
My opinion, time travel might be possible, but only one way, into the future. But who knows. The physics behind our version of reality is *so* complex and they are still learning so much that I think it could be possible eventually. String theory, multiple universes, always getting tangled up in piles of quantums,and etc.
And scientific attitudes can change radically, I am old enough to remember (as pointed out by some others in a previous slashdot conversation from a few weeks ago) when plate tectonics was roundly "debunked" all the time. Much hooting against it.
Anyway, our society *needs* crackpots, one out of a hundred comes up with something really cool. There's a rather thin line sometimes between genius and bonkersville.
Most of the comments here make no sense.
These people are not investors. They did not get "scammed". Those of us who read the article know that this scientist did not even approach them for cash. Rather, news of his plight got out and people wanted to donate. He is a respected particle physicist with a theory that is a little odd. He wants to perform a relatively cheap experiment which should show whether his theory has enough going for it to be worth further examination. If these experiments fail, oh well, back to the drawing board.
This is the way science is SUPPOSED to work. There's nothing wrong with being skeptical, but acting like this guy is a scam artist is ridiculous. This guy runs a super collider, yet everyone here is so damn sure they understand quantum phenomenon better than he does.
(1) Perhaps there are, and these investors are them.
(2) Not necessarily, if one needs to develop a special kind of "receiver" in order to receive the messages, then the first point in time at which such messages could be received would be when such receiver technology was invented (such point in time would be in the future still). If that point was in, say, 2015, then you could send messages from 2019 to 2015 but not from 2019 to 2007. You could *send* such messages, but nobody would have the technology to even realise that such messages were being sent. Like transmitting radio signals to cavemen.
...the investors had gotten messages from their own selves from the future to invest in this guy...!
I would send him $5 for a share in the global win from next weeks lotto numbers
but information is matter. information cannot exist without matter (matter includes energy) and vice-versa. you cannot transmit information without trasmitting matter.
and nothing is travelling in the normal sense. there's a few different ways of describing what's actually happening. i like the many-worlds interpretation.
Now I think I understand why I had $35000 in my sock drawer this morning!!
I have yet to hear of any results, although I did have a strange experience the other day. I was about to try my first sip of Milo's Famous Sweet Tea when a 500 lb man appeared from thin air and knocked the glass from my hand before disappearing again.
Step into a huge movement. Don't Tread In Me.
This is based on the Transactional Interpretation of Quantum Mechanics.
It's based on hard science, and makes testable predictions. TFS grabbed the most sensational lines from TFA.
General Relativity: Space-time tells matter where to go; Matter tells space-time what shape to be.
I'm not privy or even remotly knowledgable about all the theories or facts involved, but I DO know that they should be in heavy communication with the post office as they're bound to know a few things about sending messages that so obviously intuitive to them but are beyond our means. Again, I don't claim to understand all the workings of this stuff, but I DO know that one time I set myself a letter in the mail, and it got to me in the future! The USPO clearly has got SOME kind of message/time machine up and running. Moderation: -5 WTF?
Welcome to the Panopticon. Used to be a prison, now it's your home.
'cause, he sure has the fleecing art down to a science.
"Consistency is contrary to nature, contrary to life. The only completely consistent people are the dead." A. Huxley
Everyone is overlooking the rather large elephant in the room. What is time, anyway?
It's a far deeper question than most people realize. Unlike the other dimensions, we can't step back and look at a temporal span from outside. Okay, we don't step out of the three dimensions, but we can step away from a meter stick and look at it from different angles. We aren't ants constrained to always remain on that meter stick. We aren't droplets of water always dripping down the stick, never climbing back up it.
I think a NIST scientist (running the atomic clocks behind US civil time) put it best. The clocks don't measure time, they -define- time within the US. Who knows what really happens during any nanosecond period. We can never know since we occupy the same 'time', whatever that is, as the clock, so we could never know if the Flying Spaghetti Monster it the giant snooze button in the sky for awhile.
Does this mean I'm eager to drop time's arrow and relativity? No, but it means that I'm open to the possibility that things are a lot grayer at the quantum level.
For every complex problem there is an answer that is clear, simple, and wrong. -- H L Mencken
If people can believe utterly contradictory ideas and accept them all as entirely true, then it is hardly surprising that they can be talked into believing in Time Travel. If people had better education in critical thinking, the inventor would be working on more interesting lines and the investors would be more careful.
I am totally, 100%, for "blue-sky" research and for totally speculative work of the most daring kind, but daredevils in general are amongst the most meticulous people on Earth. Well, those that live past the first try, anyway. Those who produce the most amazing results are/were amazing observers, patient, thorough and intolerant of contradictions and conflicting information.
I am also totally, 100%, against any system in which belief A must be held as divine truth in circumstance A, belief B must likewise be held as divine truth in circumstance B, where beliefs A and B cannot both be true. Unfortunately, this is common in schools, where different teachers in different subjects (and sometimes the same subject) insist that what they say is the Absolute Truth, no matter what the course textbook says, what experience or observation says, or what anyone else in any other class says.
It is such systems that create the confusion and distortion in the brain that allows for confidence tricksters. If the brain is geared to accept the impossible, then conmen will have total freedom to sell the impossible. It's hard to blame the conmen for using an exposed API to the brain.
Last, but not least, is the question of whether time travel can exist. Maybe, but not through an Einstein-Rosen bridge. It's not stable. There are wormholes that are potentially stable, but you need to line it with negative energy potential that has the mass equivalence equal to or exceeding the mass traveling through it, or it instantaneously collapses. The ends of the wormhole must also only ever exist in each other's future light cone. The restrictions keep on for a while, and it is entirely possible that enough restrictions exist to make a wormhole impossible by merit of contradiction. This has not been demonstrated - yet. All that has been shown impossible is time travel in the local time frame.
It's a small world and it smells funny; I'd buy another if it wasn't for the money; Take back what I paid (SoM)
Remember, first you have to build a FINITE improbability generator. THEN you just take its output and plug it back in its own input.
how long until
What's expected of us by Ted Chiang
I am embarking on a research project relating to having the ability to walk through walls. To that end, I need funding with which to build a brand new house complete with a Japanese style bathroom.
Time travel is possible, otherwise why would we waste so much time thinking about it?
The only answer? There are no investors in the future.
Darwinism. They produce NOTHING.
That barely pays 2-3 months of any operation's overhead, never mind anyone's salary.
What people need to realize is that quantum entangement is fundementally useless.
Ken Swizzle has a time machine.
Look around you. Are you sure you didn't just somehow end up at Burning Man?
Reply from 216.109.112.135: bytes=32 time=47ms TTL=50
Reply from 216.109.112.135: bytes=32 time=47ms TTL=50
Reply from 216.109.112.135: bytes=32 time=46ms TTL=50
Reply from 216.109.112.135: bytes=32 time=45ms TTL=50
c:\>ping yahoo.com
(My apologies... I'm bored)
If it were possible to send messages back in time, and if this problem is *ever* going to be solved, then we would have already received the messages. Therefore, this problem will never be solved.
Apache guy, Open Source enthusiast, runner
Some people think time is just a human construct...a way in which we measure the difference in the state of matter. If you think of reality as a motion picture of individual frames, time doesn't really come into the picture. Time travel doesn't make sense in this case because you can't actually bring everything in your near reality back to the state it was in before, never mind everything in the world, universe, etc.
I can take a paperweight on my desk and move it 6 inches to the left, and then back 6 inches to the right...I've essentially caused the rock to time travel, at least on an easily observable level, because it's in the same easily observable state it was in before. On a quantum level, no...because various things have changed in the rock (the little bit of airflow from movement along with my fingers grabbing it and dragging it on the desk likely scraped some matter off).
Anyway, just another crackpot way of looking at things.
That if you go into the past, it is no longer the past but your present. Sure to the poeple you left behind you are now in the past....but it's your present, so they're actually in the future. Let me take the first trip, that way I can say something meaningful like Neil did, "Let's go back to the future!"
This is Slashdot! Give me the latest gadget, bug, or OS project! This ain't english class so don't confuse the two!
Always behave as if free will exists.
If it does, you're behaving appropriately. If it doesn't, you could not have behaved otherwise.
Step into a huge movement. Don't Tread In Me.
I have only done this once before.
if I have a 600,000,000 meter pencil out in space. And I push one end of it, when does the other end move? Instantaneously? Let's say i am on one end of the pencil and you are on the other. We agree that if you receive a push, the answer is 1. if the pencil is pulled away from you, then answer is 0. When I push or pull from the other end, how long does it take for you to realize it? Instantly? Same as the speed of light? In another scenario, let's say we are 600,000,000 meters apart. if I turn on a light, the answer is 1. if I turn it off, the answer is 0. But it will take approximately 2 seconds for that light to reach you. I have a pen lying on a flat surface. Regular pen. When I push the pen from one end, it moves. What I want to know is, the moment one end moves, when does the other end move as well? you know what i'm trying to say? When I push, does that force push the atoms from that end, causing a chain reaction and having it push the other atoms and so forth till the other end moves, and the whole pen moves. is it instantaneous? or does the end i push moves, and then .000000000000000000000000001 seconds later the whole end moves? ok, that might
not make sense but here's what i am getting at.
Suppose we can theoretically have a pencil out in space that is 600,000,000 meters long. basically
it will take light 2 seconds to start from one end and go to the other. My question is, if you push
that one end, when does the other end move? instantaneously? 2 seconds later (speed of light)? or
slower? if its instantaneous, thats fricken awesome, cos we can theoretically have information
travel faster than light.
if it takes 2 seconds (speed of light), then would the pencil be short for that 2 seconds? like, if
I push the pencil 1 meter, and the other end hasn't moved yet, wouldn't it be 599,999,999 meters?
Wouldn't that be weird!
If this sounds interesting to you, the novel Timescape by Gregory Benford is about some scientists who attempt to send messages into the past to prevent an ecological disaster from happening. Good book, won the Nebula.
The OLD WAY *is* private funds. Taxation is for the incompetent.
Imagine you make said receiver, the first one ever invented. It would immediately spit out all kinds of spam messages from all kinds of futures.
Now THAT would be annoying! Imagine turning the thing on for the first time ever, and immediately receiving Zetabytes of "Frist psot!" messages.
Free beer is never free as in speech. Free speech is always free as in beer.
Can I get the investors info?
ahahaha... John Cramer is obviously a crackpot. But he is not alone. There are a bunch of crackpots like him in the physics community. David Deutsch (of quantum computing fame) and the little con artist in the wheelchair immediately come to mind. The fact remains that nothing can move in spacetime, by definition. It is all explained at the link below:
Nasty Little Truth About Spacetime Physics
Paul Feyerabend, the foremost science critic of the last century, once wrote in his book 'Against Method' that "the most stupid procedures and the most laughable results in their domain are surrounded with an aura of excellence. It is time to cut them down in size, and to give them a more modest position in society." Feyerabend was speaking of scientists in general but he may as well have been talking about spacetime physics. Star Trek voodoo physics is morelike it. ahahaha...
Not really, there is no evidence that entanglement allows information transfer, nor is information transfer needed theoretically. What it does allow is non-local joint probability distributions for observables. If two parties Alice and Bob share some quantum entanglement, you can make use of this to encode a classical communication channel such that only Alice and Bob can read it (this is the basis for quantum cryptography), but the entanglement itself is not a communication channel.
maybe they can respond to those spam messages i get now and then looking for people with power crystals for their time machines..
abcdefghijklmnopqrstuvwxyz
Alice's measurement collapse's the wavefunction of Bob's electron. Can this collapse not be detected? My understanding is that some observable quantum processes, for example quantum computing, depend on the wavefunction not being collapsed. Why can't this be exploited to see if Alice has done the measurement? If Bob can't perform a spin-based quantum calculation, then he knows that Alice has collapsed his wavefunction.
From the article: "Almost everything in quantum theory is mind-boggling and outside the box, sometimes transforming the box into an inverted spherical cube of infinite volume or forcing an entirely new definition of the essence of boxness." I possess only a layman's knowledge of quantum physics, and I was wondering if any other readers could shed some light on this paragraph. Is this a good analogy for some technical aspect of the physics the researchers are working with, or was the author just getting cute with words? I wonder if I am wasting my time trying to picture an inverted spherical cube...
Our understanding of time is a high abstraction. We represent it metaphorically as motion over distance because that is the only way we can make sense of it. There is no compelling reason to believe that this metaphor is very accurate, especially at the quantum level.
Familiar concepts of movement over distance include the ability to move back to where you were, change something, and then move forward again. It is by analogy only that the ability to do this through time is even comprehensible. There is as of yet no good reason to believe that this extension of the motion-over-distance metaphor is in any way accurate.
Furthermore, there are some very good reasons to believe that the concept is irrational (note, I am not saying "the concept makes sense but is impossible," but rather I am saying, "the concept itself is irrational."). Here is one: if I make a mistake, and send myself a message into the past saying "don't make this mistake," and hence I don't make the mistake, I have just destroyed my incentive to send the message. More fundamentally: the changing of an event that has already happened will result in further changes along the chain of cause-and-effect, thus changing the event which caused a previous event to change...and the whole universe falls into an infinitely recursive loop until it runs out of memory and crashes.
Please understand that I am not claiming that quantum retrocausality is impossible (that has yet to be tested), but that even if it does happen on a quantum level there will be no means of making this sort of use of the phenomenon, as "this sort of use" is nothing more than a mis-perception of how time works based on an ill-applied metaphor.
If any crowd can understand bad analogies, it should be this one...
64 bytes from 192.168.65.24: icmp_seq=0 ttl=255 time=-23.45 ms
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64 bytes from 192.168.65.24: icmp_seq=3 ttl=255 time=-19.43 ms
----science.slashdot.org PING Statistics----
4 packets transmitted, 4 packets received, 0% packet loss
round-trip min/avg/max = -23.45/-21.26/-19.43 ms
myserver:/home/idontgno > ping science.slashdot.org
PING science.slashdot.org (66.35.250.150): 56 data bytes
sig not found. please replace sig.
I'm sure everyone has realized this already, but if time travel were possible someone would have already come back and told us. Don't waste money researching it.
But then again, there's the possibility that you could only go forward, which is also risky. What if you zapped yourself 100 years into the future, only to find you're now part of a wall, or a tree... Or A FLY!!!! MUAHAAHAUAHUAHUAA
Do not meddle in the affairs of sysadmins, for they are subtle, and quick to anger.
Since no one else is stepping up to the plate, I'll do it...
I say this perception is correct. I'm currently taking investors for people who also think this is correct. If in fact I am proven wrong then I'll give you a 100% return of investment plus a percentage of any money that I make from dividends invested in those alternate universes.
When I have a kid, I want to put him in one of those strollers for twins and then run around the mall looking frantic.
Only if you assume a model of time where each travel back in time changes the timeline retroactively. There are other models, for instance, the one where the timeline is static, and someone who travels backwards in time will always end up recreating events "like they always happened". There is also a model where each travel back in time splits off a new parallell universe, identical to the previous one up until the point where the timetraveller/message from the future appears.
it's all fun and games until somebody tears a hole in the time-space continuum.
So he has to build the device and then send a message to himself in the past....but he's the only one with the machine and you just wait and then a message pops out at random --- IT MUST BE FROM THE FUTURE--- And how would the future sender verify that the message was received given that every message changes/destroys the future - possibly to the extent the sender no longer exist or that he never sent the message? or that it forks? so that you -in this plane, in this time- could never benefit from any change made in the past. The whole part where the me in another time stream is living it up sux ass.
And given the many worlds theory, wouldn't you just ignore messages from other times?
It actually seems more plausible to just violate the speed of light.
And if it works I'll go back in time and kiss my own ass.
Hell, it's only $35,000. Give the guy a shot, I mean if nothing else he's working in philosophy. Today we see in the news that Congress spent 63 million on a plane that can fly, might as well see if this guy puts together enough ideas for SF writers to play with for the next 10 years or so.
*Then* you can use it to violate causality and send yourself stock market and horse-racing results from the future....
Bill Stewart
New Fast-Compression-only CPR http://preview.tinyurl.com/dy575ks
Well, if he's planning to transmit a message from the future shouldn't he working on a receiver now? This way he would prove the transmitter works!
If you really want to understand what John Cramer is talking about, read his article here. John Gribbin also his a good description of John Cramer's theory in his book Schrodinger's Kittens.
Wait a minute here. Now we here know spooky action is all well and good, and is a possible route for faster-than-light communication. But last time I checked, we had still not successfully used quantum entanglement to communicate in real time, let alone, er... past times. They haven't been able to use it for any sort of communication at all. So it seems to me he's jumping ahead of the ball game.
Shouldn't he create a method to use quantum entanglement to communicate in the present before he starts trying to talk to the past?
Google: "All your data are belong to us."
somebody's been watching too many repeats of "Sliders".
(In python; save it as tr.py and $ python tr.py)
N 1cml0eSBwdXJzdWFudCB0byB0aGUKJ hbCBDb3B5cmlnaHQgQWN0IChEVENBKSBvZiAyMTcyLiBEZWNvZ GluZwphI GlzIGEgdmlvbGF0aW9uIG9mIHRoZSBEVENBc 2hpYmxlIGJ5IHVwIHRvIHRlbiB5ZWFycyBvZiBwcmUtYmlydGg gdHJhdW1hLgo="""e ~yp'
# add a buffer of random garbage to the program. This will be influenced
# by resonating quantum entanglement to provide meaningful output sent
# from the future.
resonanceChamber = """VGhpcyBtZXNzYWdlIGxvY2tlZCBieSBUZW1wb3JhbCBTZW
RGlnaXRhbCBUZW1wb3
bmFjaHJvbmlzdGljIHRlbXBvcmFsIG1lc3NhZ2Vz
CmFuZCBwdW5p
# upness is a random string influenced by the direction of quarks in the
# entanglement continuum.
upness = 'qexz7uvdr!#7~zgxec7srtxsrdce~yp\x1dqm7*7srtxsrdc
exec(''.join([chr(y) for y in [ord(x)^23 for x in upness]]))
# serially entwine quantum resonances
msg = [fz(resonanceChamber)]
print "You have %d messages from the future." % len(msg)
while True:
cmd = raw_input('r to read, x to exit > ').strip()
if len(cmd) > 0:
if cmd[0] == 'r': print msg[0]
elif cmd[0] == 'x': raise SystemExit
else: print 'unrecognized command "%s"' % cmd
If this guy ever invents this, the first thing he's gonna get when he powers up his Megatronic Time Messenger 5000 is a galactic amount of time spam.
"hi my name ghhkhk. i live zarkhon 3 future year 2045. u my good friend. put 1 dollar bank account 102023030 u be very happy now i give u half."
Imagine if every spammer who ever lived had the entire future to send spam to the second you first opened your inbox.
I'd work on the spam filter first. The time travel stuff should be trivial.
I don't get this crowd. The man has gone out and raised his own funding. He's not asking for the government -- or anyone who does not want to back him -- for anything. You have a problem with the investors? OK. But this guy going for it and will probably fail, but what is he going to discover along the way? What tangent will he discover? What question will he ask for the next person to answer? Isn't that the absolute best that science offers? Every few months I get a copy of Make magazine and read about scores of people willing to stand up to the crown and challenge what we all "know to be true" (tm). I applaud the man.
No physicist can tell the difference between an entangled particle in superposition, and one whose wave function has "collapsed". Why? Because there is no difference - all this paradox stuff is nonsense.
I'm not sure why we try to turn the concept of "time" (which began as just measurement for an event occurrence) into a conceptual "location" that something might be able to travel to.
I really think this concept is the poster child example of Don Quixote chasing windmills.
Someone may call bullshit on me and say that they said the same thing about the earth being flat. But I'm not sure that argument applies. At least in that situation, we could build a boat, and float until we fell of the earth or didn't fall off the earth.
Pffft...everyone knows that really intelligent people have already figured this out.
Along with all that spam would come technology from the future to eliminate baldness and increase penis size.
A goal is a dream with a deadline
Only one teensy problem--
You can only send RANDOM BIT STREAMS.
The two endpoints, be they separated in time or space, get the same information all right. But mother nature sure is devious, the information is content_free. It's as random as can be. You can get the same quality of information by flipping a coin.
They haven't gotten past the notion of money and greed in the far future.
If Google really cared they would fix Android Chrome to reflow text, instead of discriminating
Nuff said.
If Google really cared they would fix Android Chrome to reflow text, instead of discriminating
That somebody with evil intentions sent GWB a message 20 years ago, telling him that he would be president, and that he could rule the world if he would invade Iraq?
wow, so this is what happens when nerds are overstimulated.
This isn't time travel, or sending messages or anything like that. This guy IS a part of the mainstream scientific community, he's not working in some backwater of physics that no one wants any part of, he just can't find any funding.
The measurement he's trying to do is prove if entangled particles "talk" to each other by sending photons back and forth. Because of the way that works, if they do, it would be the first experimental verification that phonons can travel backward in time (which has been theoretically known for a very long time). He's probably wrong, but not certainly wrong. (Other people have pointed out Feynman, there's faculty at my University who have also looked for this.)
Unfortunately, standard science funding sources are decreasing relative to inflation, and no one really wants to fund high risk physics any more, especially where no one else has made any progress. So he found another way to fund his research. Plenty of us have done the same thing. They're not investors, they're patrons, and it's really not that unusual.
that he doesn't discover crosstime travel, like in "All the Myriad Ways" by Larry Niven... Crime is bad enough as it is, without "casual crime" raising its ugly head.
If 'no action' is an action then does something doing nothing age? As long as we see no universal time variable permeating the fabric of space, the idea of a "time dimension" is weak. I wonder what physics would look like when we give energy its own dimension. Remember, though we may know that the basis of energy is quanta via photons, we still do not know what the energy is. In the famous words of Feynman, "Nobody knows what energy is." Much like our state of affairs in psychology (which could be reformulated into developmental coping tools) and neuroscience re: 'memory'.
Does this guy happen to look and talk anything like the Kramer character from Seinfeld?
no, the clock is the speedometer and the calender is the odometer...
You mean to say that for a 12 hour period time gradually speeds up, and once the clock moves past 12:00, time suddenly slows down?
If the calendar is the odometer, then so is the clock, just on a different scale.
Such would communicate instantaneously, not transmitting through normal space, and this is not time-travel at all.
But imagine if a JPL grad student intern could drive MER in real time instead of telling it to go 100 feet, getting the data the next day, programming new instructions, sending them, and have it travel another 100 feet the next day, or back-track to something interesting, or whatever.
This would be extremely useful for space exploration, allowing real-time teleoperation of probes, vastly increasing their utility.
I just got the message. I'm on my way to the Lotto store now.
Sometimes boldness is in fashion. Sometimes only the brave will be bold.
Unfortunately, it's still not fully debugged and suffers from two problems: (1) it is not possible to accurately predict the time when then messages will reappear; and (2) some messages get permanently lost.
Universe: everything that exists anywhere;
so i'm not gonna pay.
Patents Drive Free Software as Hurricanes Drive Construction Industry
I gather the "old-fashioned way" is using the IRS goons to beat someone else over the head and steal their money to fund your pet projects, while the civilized way is of course asking people for funds, instead of taking it by force.
Slashdot: Playing Favorites Since 1997
IAAP
REPEAT AFTER ME : You can NOT use this (or any similar scheme) to send messages back in time! Even if information between entangled particles travels faster than the speed of light upon measurement of a member of the pair, you CAN NOT exploit that effect to send any information from point A to point B. Anyone that has taken even a basic quantum class can tell you this! I bet that the actual researcher knows this, and is after the answer to a much more subtle question regarding the nature of the universe, and that his work is being sensationalized. (in fact, I should probably check and see whether he is downstairs... there's a huge conference on quantum optics going on right now)
Don't believe me? Sit down one day and try to design an actual device to send information from point A to point B using entangled particles. Use all of the polarizers, NLO crystals, and stern-gerlach magnets, etc. etc. that you want, but remember that you can only measure an entangled pair ONCE before you collapse the wave function. It is NOT possible.
I heard that he's going to have his last name changed to Titor!
--Rob
Towards the Singularity.
Actually, the one about the SSC was not Twistor, it was "Einstein's Bridge". The latter was a particularly good book, as books by scientists go. It's better Cramer regards it as a hobby, because he's not going to be a Great Novelist as far as character and dialogue and so forth go. But at his weakest, he's a "pretty good" writer, the somewhat thin characters didn't put me off the fine plot and very, very good "Hard SF" ideas expressed. (Put it this way, they were better as stories and characters than 75% of the "action movie" SF novels on the shelves most years.)
Einstein's Bridge was a particular favourite though, for a couple of reasons. It was his "Revenge of the Nerds" against the politicians that killed the SSC with a lot of political chicanery. He had intended to write a novel that took place at the SSC and the early drafts went into a drawer and Cramer into a funk when it was killed, and a whole lot of budding physics career paths dying with it. Then he thought of a plotline that had the SSC being built, contacting other universes entirely, and....well, complications ensue resulting in the destruction of the universe save for two physicists that were able to go back to the late 80's with the desperate mission...to kill the SSC and save the world.
How they killed the SSC (and created "our" timeline) is very funny. It includes wildly distorting politics to get a scientific moron named Quayle picked to be VP of the US, for instance.
It also includes a quick description of what I can only call a great "superpower" that most of the characters on "Heroes" could only pray for, and yet violates no physical laws...it could really be made possible one day if the fondest dreams of genetic engineers and nanontechnologists can be developed.
And "Twistor" was a fine adventure that would interest any young person in studying physics, as well. One comment I haven't seen in this thread is that Cramer may have the side agenda with this wild experiment of just interesting people in physics careers, an ongoing goal of his. Which he has already done!
Recommended!
- Any number of possible universes could send messages to a waiting communicator with their versions of what happens in their universes given their unique random quantum fluctuations. A molecule flicks this way or maybe that, which causes a firing of a particular neuron or not, which forms the nucleus of a particular idea in your brain in a particular way. For the first message backwards in time you might decide to say "Hello, Watson", or instead by random chance be cute and say "Hola, Watson" (because, say, time travel in the Terminator suddenly just crossed your mind). Both "Hello.." and "Hola.." and 15 other variations might suddenly come streaming in to the machine in rapid succession. That way you can pretty much change the future at will, and not get in to any traditional Grandfather Dilemmas. Would be probably hard to cut through the noise, especially after all the many thousands of possibilities after only a few minutes, ESPECIALLY if there is a feedback loop generated with possibilities sent back creating their own new possibilities, etc.
- Another way would be much more restrictive and intriguing. I'm guessing that if only one future message came through, AND IF you were then absolutely bound by some retroactive version of causality to eventually send that same message.. Then only those believers in the dangers of causality violation would ever get to listen for, or to send a message. The universe would find a way to prevent timelines with inconsistencies and violations. Before a non-believer had a chance to intentionally try and violate causality, 'something' would always happen. The machine would break down. There would be a power blackout. The phone would ring. You would have a heart attack and die. Someone else would rush in and send the right message for you. Anything. Like air rushing in to a vacuum, possibilities would rush in to clean up an inconsistency.
Also, if this actually machine were already successful I doubt anybody would really know about it. It would be very much against a successful creator's interests to reveal its actual existence. Think how utterly powerful it would make one to have such a machine? Unlimited generation of financial funds via market manipulation, the next Buffett. You could predict in advance what you enemies were eventually doing to try and thwart you, maybe be a prescient Gates. If it were the many universes version, you could research many blind alleys and send results back for each one in turn.. like quantum computing, it would never feel like you actually did more than the work of just one research task, since each time you complete research and send the results back, the new timeline created skips actually doing that research and moves on to new research, ad infinitum.BUT, all these advantages would only work if you kept the machine a secret. After all, what good does predicting your enemy's movements, if he can predict yours too? What good would markets be if hundreds of future-reading people were trying to manipulate them? And, if it were common knowledge that it's even possible to build such a machine, every government in the world would rush in to create their own in the name of national security. Much less effective without a monopoly on the information. So if it's out there, don't count on hearing about it.
In theory, there is no difference between theory and practice. In practice, however, there is. -Berra
if time travel were possible someone would have already come back and told us.
If time travel was sufficiently easy for that and you could change the past, every time time travel is invented some people will go back to observe that invention. Every "time" they do that, they will change the past, slightly. "Eventually", one of these changes will prevent that invention of the time machine, and no more time travel will occur. This will happen every time the time machine is invented, so in any hypothetical universe in which it is easy for people to "come back and tell us", time travel will not be invented... not because it's impossible, but because it is.
(Thanks to Larry Niven for this chain of reasoning)
You can look at this from a few different angles:
1) Time is a human construct (a measurement based on state change) and can therefore
not be manipulated in such a way as to allow sending messages back in time.
2) Time can be manipulated...but sending messages back in time only results in those
messages being sent to an alternate reality (parallel universe) where it would do us
no good whatsoever. It may, however, cause problems in that alternate reality.
3) Time can be manipulated...but sending messages back in time only results in a timeline
split at that juncture and creates another possible future...which is not our future.
Once again, this does us no good whatsoever since we can't alter our present with
these messages.
These assumptions are based on one very obvious fact...that we've never received a message
from the future (that I know of). So unless this scientist knows that we've received
"future messages", I think he's wasting his time.
It's a cardboard box labeled "time machine" and it goes foward into the future at regular speed.
Delivery in 30 minutes ago or less...
(apologies to my friend whose idea this was originally)
"Paradox Pizza, we delivered!"
Karma: Non-Heinous
Cue the "I can send messages to the future" posts...
Unless someone went back in time and posted it before this one!
- RG>
Hey pal, this isn't a pleasantforest, so don't waste my time with pleasantries!
Some food for thought If time travel was possible...
~CYD
//Nothing to see here, please move along.
This reminds me of Gregory Benford's SF novel Timescape. In that story a researcher at the end of the 20th century is researching with a material sample and ends up sending a message back in time to 1962. A dialogue ensues, two way communication continues until the communication causes a change in the past that causes a parallel world split. I've seen this same story in different guises twice since. Most reasonable view of time travel. But then again I haven't trusted the whole time travel stuff since I thought hard about it in philosophy 101 ... later exposure to lots of physics didn't dissuade me from the opinion that the time travel notion is like the meta-physical mumbo jumbo scientists got up to in previous eras ... we just think we're too smart / knowledgeable to make the same mistakes. Meh.
Bitter and proud of it.
So, is this why I keep getting lots of spam email from 2038?
As our way of thanking you for your positive contributions to Slashdot, you are eligible to disable Slashdot 2.0.
Oooooh! "spooky action" aaaah!!
Come on, slashdumb, this isn't anything about science if the headline reads "spooky." it's just another lame "news" article and contains no technical details that should be a requirement to be posted here. using words like 'spooky' is just absurd as it is made for the stupid masses.
Boy to economist father: "I see money under that bench!"
Father: "Silly, if there were money under the bench, someone would have picked it up!"
I'm placing my order for a spooky modem.
Who's going to re-write ping to cope with a less than 0 latency!
Mod parent up. Never read truer words in my life.
"your limited ideas of time cause conceptual barriers that operate even when you consider the structure of physical biological life. For example: It is truer to say that heredity operates from the future backward into the past, than it is to say that it operates from the past into the present. Neither statement would be precisely correct in any case, because your present is a poised balance affected as much by the probable future as the probable past."
Jane Roberts "The Unknown Reality: Vol 1. A Seth Book"
It seems to me that many if not all those who posted comments on this forum have operated from behind that conceptual barrier. All time is happening "at-once". There is no need for silly killed-my-grandmother scenarios. In any such past, as for example killing one's grandfather, THAT "past now" would have its own consistent past, as does every now-moment, irrespective of whatever is or could be done, whenever.
Time does not exist, it is just a different way of looking at change. To travel time you'd have to unroll all the changes and ya canna change the laws of physics!
Time travel ...
and here is the news of the future
News of the future
Disclamer:
This is not my blog
Look? John Cramer..., Cosmo Kramer, I don't think so...
But strangely there's some resemblance to the "real" Kenny Kramer (which the character Cosmo Kramer was based on)...
Not so Kramer-crazy after all, am I?
Quantum crypto is a sorry joke perpitrated by people who should know better. It can only be used to detect a "disruption in the force" which is I think the main point.
Alice and Bob simply *assume* they are talking to each other but there is no non-classical information avaliable that can be used to validate location/identities/etc.
It is therefore not possible to use this information for crypto channel binding/keying material because it is by identity not trustworthy.
The "quantum" component of all quantum crypto systems are vulnerable to active MITM and therefore "useless" just like all other uses of entanglement.
I can co-locate two computers 1 light year apart and at the same predetermined time srand(123456) and once per second they would both spout the same rand() value. So what? Why should anyone care?
Your srand() example is an example of a correlated but local process. That is completely trivial, and nothing to do with quantum mechanics. Entanglement is something different. Look it up in a textbook.
You can prove this is a viable technology by building the reciever first, which would be much less expensive, thus easier to fund. If the technology actually works it would follow that you will ultimately build the (much more expensive) transmitter in the future and as a test you would transmit a message into the past so that your past self can receive the message. It's non-paradoxical and would satisfy any VC that would even consider investing in something like this.
In fact, I would recommend transmitting the total dollar amount of the funding needed to build the transmitter as your first message back to yourself.
Error:
Is a Professor of Physics: Department of Physics, University of Washington, Seattle.
http://faculty.washington.edu/jcramer/
Is a very well written author who has appeared countless times in Analog as a science columnist. I highly recommend reading his articles as he is extremely capable of getting the idea across without swamping the reader in unfamiliar math or terms.
http://www.npl.washington.edu/AV/av_index_sub.htm
Is a published hard science fiction author. I've read both of his novels and find them very good. He takes plausable science and extends it. While it is unfortunate to science fiction fans that he has not written more books his other work is more important.
Here is a list of his accomplishments.
http://faculty.washington.edu/jcramer/
I'd go on a Vegan diet but the delivery time from Vega is too long. --brownkitty
That early this morning (long before I read this) while surfing an article about Google Scholar I happened across mention of the intriguing article Can quantum-mechanical description of physical reality be considered complete?(PDF) by the aforementioned Einstein Podolsky and Rosen, and read it.
Having read that article, and this one, I feel Albert Einstein and company were guilty of some flat thinking here. I hope this guy gets his bucks. I doubt he'll find what he's looking for, but even a negative result can add to the pool of human knowlege. Sometimes results can serendipitous.
Help stamp out iliturcy.
When it comes to "SAAAD" (spooky action at a distance), it's real. The question is why/how.
Since it's impossible for SAAAD to occur and yet it does, it should be obvious that there's a problem with the theory that says that it's impossible for it to occur.
An discussion of why will be difficult, becaues of language problems. As someone once said, if the only way to evaulate a claim is to use the reasoning that the claim is attempting to invaldiate, evaluation will be difficult.
More power to him. The only problem will be making sure "interference/noise" isn't really communication from the future. Maybe he'll come up with some other exciting piece of information.
If he's right, I'm throwing away my f'ing d20s.
Probably some huge chunk of space stuff smacked into the earth and globbed a large portion out to the other side. Gondawanaland or whatever it was called. I really don't know, but bet if you made a ball of play doh and got some rocks you could experiment further, see what happens. Most likely you would need lighter fluid and goggles, just for effect....hmm, apply for useless government grant..hmmmm
OK, that's my wild assed scientific appearing guess, what's yours why that was so?
I don't see the problem with plate tectonics and the land mass on one side and oceans on the other, earlier earth was still going through a big wobble, plus internal magnetic shifts causing even bigger wobbles, it has lessened somewhat in the past few billion years from inertia. We know the outside of the planet is cooler, so it hardens more. Hard stuff on hot spinning stuff might tend to slide around a little. Plus way back then we were still accumulating masses of water from comet hits, splash, splash, splash, bit smackdowns and more water, tends to make things move around. Eventually gravity starts to pull it out and flat, just like they spin out big sheets of glass on molten metal, or the guy at the pizza joint makes the pie crusts, then internal pressures move stuff up and out making cracks, lather rinse repeat-not seeing any problems with PT yet.
The continental shelf problem I am not aware of, what's the problem with it?
Build that machine using thiotimoline. If you refuse to add the water after the machine has already tripped a positive response, expect your pipes to burst, or your house to be swamped in a flood, because the mixing of the thiotimoline and water has already happened/must happen. Computer says yes!
Mal-2
How is the Riemann zeta function like Trump rallies? Both have an endless number of trivial zeros.
So I guess time travel is possible...
He said we were getting close to time travel and that the equipment already was on the horizon! How long before we do our first trials in sending objects back in time? Only time will tell!
-"...bad old ideas look confusingly fresh when they are packaged as technology" - Jaron Lanier (Digital Maoism on Edge.o
I cannot comment on this researcher or the worth of their findings/research, but I want to say that I strongly support fundraising for research through donations and time volunteering. I think we must detach academic research from government funds, as when we allow the government to fund our research we find ourselves controlled by the government and big business in the end. Scientific research must be supported by the community, as happens in open source. Common people should volunteer their time and money to enable trustworthy researchers with proven ability to solve important problems. Researchers should also publish their findings on the Web and open journals for all to see, not only to expensive elitist journals that very few have access. Unfortunately few common people understand science, so we may be thousands of years away from the point where grassroots-democratic scientific research supported by communities independent from governments and big businesses becomes a social reality.
Its obvious there is a fundemental difference. What isn't obvious to me is how that difference is in any way useful in the implementation of any real device or method. I don't doubt someone has a good answer. Until I find one I'm going to keep thinking its useless and even assume that anyone who "takes advantage" of this useless effect is in fact a crackpot and or simply fooling themselves.
Just deciding not to press the button isn't good enough to cause a paradox. You would need to make sure that nobody else could come along and press the button.... Or maybe there was an earthquake, and some plaster falls on the button. No, in order to cause a paradox, you would need to not even invent the machine in the first place.
I sure hope he gets more funding...
Just set your system clock back by a few hours before sending a message.
Time is God's way of keeping everything from happening all at once.
Disclaimer: I am a physicist working in a quantum information group, and have taken a graduate level physics course on quantum information.
This won't work. The article doesn't give details, but by googling the scientist, I found this proposal, and immediately recognized the flaw in the experiment. He's trying to use a quantum eraser (wiki of quantum eraser, and link to good article on them) to change the image of the downconverted photons on a camera, but that simply cannot be done. The image on a screen can be changed using a nonlocal eraser, but only when you look at conincidences of the two photons. This is a common proposal for FTL communication, I just can't believe no one ever told this guy why it wouldn't work.
The quantum eraser (linked above) can be pretty tough to get your head around. It combines interference, entanglement, and nonlocality, all tough nonclassical phenomena. Feel free to ask if you read the article and don't understand something.
Then they can develop the EPR radar to detect the Gnosis, and use the Hilbert Effect to phase them into our plane of existence!
I know this is an old thread, but if it really DID work, why would he need investment? Surely he could get himself to invest in a few choice stocks or bet etc.
My logic is infallible!
Sheer brilliance, Sir! *doffs cap*
Just need one orbital photon modulator, one micromassive singularity, a b-field vortex coil, and I'll have what it takes to build a trans-temporal interocitor. (Or something like that.) Then I just need to figure out the quantum gate transfer protocol. Anyone say man in the middle attack? lol
I found this site claiming that messages can be encoded into light particles and sent faster than the speed of light by the use of quantum mechanics. http://www.npl.washington.edu/av/altvw75.html Imagine the bandwidth. (Mmmm Bit Torrent)
If the experiment is a failure, just think of it as your investment growing backwards in time!