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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."
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?
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
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.
Nah, it's not worth anything. If time travel is ever developed, the universe enters an unstable state. Stability isn't returned until a scenario occurs where time travel is never discovered in the first place.
This process takes no time (obviously), so any discovery of time travel is immediately undone. Actually, this happens all the, er, time.
I have seen the future, and it is inconvenient.
It is extraordinarily sad to me that the "geeks" of this forum are considering this a financial investment rather than a scientific investment. I am a scientist, and I know that the logic of grants and funding agencies is a game that can be far removed from science, supportive of the status quo and the tenured. For $2-10K, if I had it lying around, I'd happily play "funding reviewer" in the hope of funding something small but with good potential.
This "private investment" model is intriguing, it's much more accessible than the mammoth granting agencies, perhaps better for the public than funneling public money through the NSF. It creates direct communication between scientists and interested supporters. Especially as the article quotes seem to indicate the investors are intelligent - the pooling of a small amount of money for a credible scientific result is to be encouraged. Though I do recognize one must be careful, it can be a fine line sometimes between this credible (though bleeding edge and possibly wrong) research and snake oil.
And small investments help: a year of a grad student can get a lot done. Well, with some grad students.
it could be that you can't send messages back any earlier than the time the message was created, effectively only slowing time down so it take less time for the message to arrive. Less time could be no time at all so the message arrives when it's sent.
This won't allow you to send messages 'back' in time though.
thank God the internet isn't a human right.
These experiments become physics parlor tricks, like wavefronts moving greater than the speed of light, but they aren't useful.
If you could build a system that sent a small amount of information backwards in time, even only milliseconds, you could use it to build a computer that could run an infinite loop in constant time. Problems like traveling salesman could be solved with perfect induction.
All ideas^H^H^H^H^Hprocesses in this post are Patent Pending. (as well as the process of patenting all postings)
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.
Intra-universe causality, at least. If parallel universes exist (and mathematically it makes a lot more sense if they do), then causality is a moot point. When something travels back in time, it only appears in a parallel universe with the same history up to the point in the past at which it arrives, after which it is fundamentally different. This doesn't necessarily even require a violation of the laws of physics, because there is always some finite (but infinitesimal) probability of virtual particles assembling themselves into an object from a possible future or the past. If there are parallel universes, then there are almost certainly an infinite number of them, one for every possibility, and therefore some universes exist in which time travel happens as essentially an accident of random physics, but to the observers within the universe it looks just like time travel but without causality violations.
Except that "some time travel" != "unlimited time travel". What if time travel is possible, but only for info, and each bit transmitted requires just less than the total energy of the universe for some smallest time backwards? What if that bit can represent only whether or not the bit itself was transmitted? What if there's some other limit, and time travel falls somewhere in between? What if there's complex, perhaps cyclic, dependencies among several limits?
Even those possibilities are possible to consider only after we've started to understand information dynamics, which itself is pretty recent. What if there are other kinds of limits, or other ways to get around limits, that more info engineering experience reveals? What if there are several cycles of paradigm change like that before we understand enough to even investigate time travel directly?
And what about just proving in detail how the universe prevents time travel? The current model, based mostly on Einstein's Relativity, allows for time travel in some circumstances (eg. some rotating cylindrical black holes). Why isn't it easier? Does it already happen in nature? The "intermediate" results, or just disproof, would restructure a great deal of our model of the universe.
All of which has economic benefit, likely greater than the cost.
--
make install -not war
I agree with you that most descriptions of entanglement are BS, especially in the mainstream media, but as far as Cramer's transactional interpretation goes it's just an alternative interpretation of QM. The "transaction" that occurs in this interpretation when the wave function finally collapses happens atemporally through the advanced and retarded offer waves. There's no classical information transfer. As I understand it, initially Cramer was only using this alternative interpretation as a teaching tool. Apparently now he's trying to find experimental evidence in cases where it would differ from other interpretations.
Yeah the problem with FTL is that it connects events with a space-like interval which will have different temporal ordering depending on what reference frame you're in. In the tranasctional interpretation quantum information is transmitted at exactly the speed of light (light-like separation, 0 proper time) symmetrically in time. I loved this symmetric time idea when I first read about in Feynman's Lectures on Physics (where it was applied to his absorber theory to explain radiative reaction in EM).
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...
This brings up an interesting concept. Say you invent a machine to send a message back in time 20 seconds.
:)
So in testing the machine, you receive the message, and then in 20 seconds send it. It works! Great, but...
On the second test, you start to wonder, "What would happen if I was going to send the message, but then change my mind when I receive it?"
So you receive the message, then decide not to send it. Interesting paradox, huh?
Either that, or the machine will always predict with 100% accuracy whether or not you'll push the button to send the message. So if you intend to not push it once you get the message, you'll never get the message. So there will be no way to "trick" the message into coming in.
It's a bizarre concept. Thinking about it brings up interesting thoughts like whether or not we really have free will.
*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