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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
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.
The difference between a crackpot and a scientist with a dream is that the scientist still relies on the rigorous application of the scientific method even if their theory is way outside of mainstream. It sounds like this guy is taking the latter tack. He has experiments in mind, and is completely open to the idea that they may fail.
You don't have to pick between dreaming and scientific rigor. The scientific method is how you turn your dreams into a reality -- if reality is ammenable to your dreams.
The enemies of Democracy are
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.
John Cramer has been writing science articles for the science fiction magazine Analog for some time. They are available online here: http://www.npl.washington.edu/AV
a,e,i,o,u and sometimes w and y (at be if of up cwm by)
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.
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.
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.
So the technology was invented in the future, but we have it now. But since we have it, the people in the future won't bother to discover it because they already have it, which means it wasn't ever discovered, thus in the past we didn't have it to grant to the people in the future, which means that now they had the motivation to discover it, but since they sent it back to us, they had it in the past, and just took that knowledge for granted and didn't have to discover it, so the future never discovered it, so they didn't send it back to us, so we didn't have it, and thus they didn't have it to take for granted, so they discovered it, and then sent it back to us, and so on and so forth.
Stop Global Warming!
Just say no to irreversible processes!
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.
How exactly would $350,000 help substantiate his loony idea better than $35,000?
The wealthier you are the more other people take you seriously.
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.