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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.
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.
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
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 wonder if investors' safety is guaranteed.
Slashdot Burying Stories About Slashdot Media Owned
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.
Not every crackpot is really a brilliant genius... but almost all brilliant geniuses were, at one point, considered to be crackpots.
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
"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.
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.
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.
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.
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.
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.
The Angels have the Phone Box
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.
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
64 bytes from 192.168.65.24: icmp_seq=1 ttl=255 time=-20.84 ms
64 bytes from 192.168.65.24: icmp_seq=2 ttl=255 time=-21.33 ms
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.
*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
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
I'm pretty sure that defining velocity in terms of Newtonian mechanics and then using modern understanding of time counts as being wrong. Attempting to define motion through time as a simple substitution is bound to create problems, mostly because it's making shit up.
Heck, the site even says that time dilation doesn't occur and instead attributes it to clocks slowing down ("for whatever reason"). Now, experiments in time dilation have shown that cesium atomic clocks, devices accurate to within a billionth of a second every day, show results extremely close to that predicted in general reletivity. Unless this site wants to come up with an explaination of mechanical failure for devices with such accuracy, I'm going to stick with the evidence for time dilation.
Overall, I have to say that crackpot sites by people who as far I can tell have submitted no papers to peer reviewed journals or otherwise shown expertise in the field are probably not the best place to get information on physics.
So, is this why I keep getting lots of spam email from 2038?
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Well, for one, equations for distance involving spacetime already result in interesting situations that you wouldn't get from Euclidean geometry, distances that are positive, zero, or imaginary. I'm pretty sure that you can see at this point where there's a problem, namely that using time as a dimension gives you unintuitive results (though it's certainly a plus that they, you know, work).
The evidence that cesium clocks slow down is not evidence for time dilation. It is evidence that cesium clocks slow down under certain conditions, nothing more. Anybody who insists that time can change (an oxymoron) is either an idiot, an ass kisser, or is talking about something he/she is clueless about. IOW, he or she is talking out of his/her ass. ahahaha... Uhh, given that the difference in time kept by the clocks matches almost exactly with what is predicted by relativity, I'd say that's pretty damn conclusive evidence for time dilation occuring. Unless you've got some other mechanism that you can pull out of your ass that is repeatabe, can be verified, and is otherwise examinable, then you are the one talking out of your ass.
Peer review is synonymous with ass review, IMO. ahahaha... This is why people like John Cramer, David Deutsch, Stephen Hawking, etc.. can get away with their time-travel crap and still pass as serious scientists. They're all a bunch of crackpots kissing each other's asses. ahahaha... AHAHAHA... ahahaha... Phew! Making phun of crackpot physicists is so much phucking phun. ahahaha...
Getting your methodology, results, conclusions and every other piece of information about your theories, experiments, crackpot ideas, etc out to other people who are experts in the field so that they can run your experiment, analyze your data, comb through the reasoning behind your conclusion, and otherwise do anything else to vet your theories as being good or bad is the cornerstone of science. Unless you want to attempt a system of science where everything ends up on obscure websites that attempt to find support in the bible for physics theories with no apparent grounding in reality. Hell, that same website says that not only does time not exist, but space doesn't either and instead says that everything is particles and their properties. Well, if he wanted to rebel against science he sure has done it, because as far as I can see he has no evidence backing his theories. No experiments, no models, no readily testable properties, nothing. No wonder you and the site go against peer review so much, you would have to actually put up or shut up. Instead, you and the site take pot shots at science and scientists who actually bother to follow a systematic approach to increasing knowlege.
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.