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."

obligatory

[uolamer]

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.

Its not that far fetched.

[LiquidCoooled]

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.

So?

[grub]

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!

As The Doctor once said...

[Anonymous Coward]

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.

First Post from 1972

[Timesprout]

Wooo it works!!!

Come on...

[vurg]

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.

I am already Half way there.

[jellomizer]

I can send messages to the future but I am having sending messages back.

#/bin/sh
 
#send a message 5 minutes in the future
sleep 300
echo "Hello from the Past"

But this doesn't seem to work yet

#/bin/sh
sleep -300
echo "Hello from the Future"

Push it to the limit

[Rob T Firefly]

I wonder if investors' safety is guaranteed. [ytmnd.com]

Re:Its not that far fetched.

[Walt Dismal]

According to SEC disclosure statements: "Principal investors, John Tobor, $1,000,000 New Dollars; John Smallberries, loan backed by 400,000 shares of YoyoDyne Propulsion; and one Captain J. Kirk, who hates whales."

Re:I am already Half way there.

[Anonymous Coward]

Yeah, but it works in LOLCODE:

HAI
BRB -300
VISIBLE "HAI FROM FEWCHUR LOL"
KTHXBYE

Re:I am already Half way there.

[Panaflex]

The reason it doesn't appear to work is the output happened before you even ran it, unless you didn't run it, See?? .... Look in your shell history silly man ...

>:-*-D

Re:I am already Half way there.

[D-Cypell]

Actually my grandfather did develop a negative sleep function but I got so pissed off with my great grandchildren pestering me for an early inheiritance I went back and shot the bastard.

RIAA Funded

[lbmouse]

"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.

Re:obligatory

[dfiguero]

Note to self from the future: don't invest in this idea.

Re:First Post from 1972

[teslar]

Timestamp from actual first post:

Tuesday June 12, @06:00PM

Your timestamp:

Tuesday June 12, @06:01PM

For all those who think about making fun of this gentleman for not actually having made first post, remember that the post has travelled for 25 years and has arrived within 1 minute of its designated arrival time. That's an error of approximately 7.6x10^(-8) times total time travelled... and that is better than what i can achieve at darts :)

Maybe they did...

[KingSkippus]

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.

Re:I am already Half way there.

[Anonymous Coward]

8/24/2209 1:34am I just got your responce to your script ... "Hello from the Future"

Dude you forgot 2s complement.

Re:First Post from 1972

[teslar]

has travelled for 25 years

Damn, I just realised it's not 97 anymore, goes to show the accuracy of my own time machine...make that 35 years and recalculate the error as required :) Will still be in the order of 10^(-8) though I expect

I am an investor.

[Peter Trepan]

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.

Re:I am already Half way there.

[Opportunist]

Oh, it does work. In C it does. You just have to wait a looooooooooooooong time (and ignore the compiler warning that claims you're trying to use signed where unsigned would make more sense).

Ok, it doesn't work as intended, but it compiles, so hell, ship it!

Re:for chists sake

[CaptainPatent]

You're right... he should finish the machine, then go back and tell himself to never start it!

Re:obligatory

[PPH]

According to a November 12, 2010 article in Rupert Murdoch's Wall Street Journal, this was exposed as an investment scam and the responsible parties have all been charged by the USDOJ Attorney General Sam Waterston.

Re:As The Doctor once said...

[jnaujok]

That sentence kind of got away from you there...

Re:ROI

[Chosen Reject]

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.

Re:Its not that far fetched.

[Reverend528]

1. Profit!
2. ???
3. Invent Time Machine

Dear God!

[FST777]

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.

Re:I wanna see this technology at the network laye

[SuperGillies]

shouldn't it be:

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

Re:obligatory

[WED Fan]

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.

So, how do you weed through the noise? How do you know what pair to listen to when you don't even know a message has been sent?

Weaponize this sucker, grab an intangled pair in a critical system, like a reactor, twist the sucker until it does something bad. Boom, Three Mile Island goes into shut down because an Iranian...oh, wait.

Turn this into an industrial sabotage device, grab an intangled pair from a critical processor, twist the sucker, Intel turns out faulty math co-processors in the mid-90's...oh, wait.

Blimps...New Jersey...oh, wait.

Re:Two counterpoints

[Alsee]

Like transmitting radio signals to cavemen.

Cue pissed off insulted caveman Geico commercial.

-

Re:So?

[XxtraLarGe]

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!

Did you know subscribers [slashdot.org] can see articles in the future?

Not hard for those with superior intellect

[Critical Facilities]

If this worked then there would already be investors lined up who have sent messages to themselves from the future.

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.

The trouble is that there is no such thing as universal simultaneity.

Pffft...everyone knows that really intelligent people [youtube.com]have already figured this out.

Re:Two counterpoints

[s4m7]

Dear Sir,
I am writing to inform you that I have recieved a message from your future self. Included is the text from that message.

Hello, me! I just wanted to let you know that I (you) got rich by investing in this man's method of time travelling messages! I (you) invested $2000 just one week after I (you) recieved this very message, and within six months I (you) was a millionare!
signed, Me (You).

Here's my address..

Yes, but look at the bright side...

[StressGuy]

Along with all that spam would come technology from the future to eliminate baldness and increase penis size.

Re:So?

[evilviper]

Did you know subscribers can see articles in the future?

Oddly enough, most of the articles from the future are also from the past...

Re:ROI

[NaugaHunter]

Finally, an explanation of deja-vu that makes sense - the perception of parabolic ripples of collapsing flux capacitors killing their inventors before they are made! It naturally follows that as the ripples propogating through the ether cause my arms and legs to sleep when I'm awake, not to mention that every time I remember something different from my wife it's just the Uncertainty Principle asserting itself retroactively! Though it's suspicious that it's always in her favor...

Who knew Chicago had it right all these years; I really do no longer know what time it is.

Re:obligatory

[tbo]

Disclaimer: I am a physicist who studies quantum information.

You still make money in the many world interpretation. Though trading on a sport event might not be your best bet, By having a view of the future you can sell or invest in right technologies etc, this is robust enough not to be affected by small changes.

Making money in Many Worlds is easy, even without time travel. Suppose you want to bet on who will win the World Series. Get some quantum bits, and decide beforehand on what (orthogonal) states of those qubits correspond to which teams. Prepare a superposition of all 30 possible teams. Now, measure your state, and bet all your money on whichever team your measurement tells you. Wait for the world series to finish, then either collect all your winnings, or, if you didn't win, kill yourself.

In all worlds where you're still alive, you'll have won a lot of money.

Note to theoretical computer scientists: this is very similar to how someone (who believes in Many Worlds) might try to compute the answer to a problem in the complexity class Post-BQP [caltech.edu].
Note to everyone else: don't try this at home.

Re:Not hard for those with superior intellect

[ccarson]

It works! I'm sending this message from the future to prove to all you non-believers that our experiment is/was a success! Don't believe me? Just wait, you'll see!

Re:I am already Half way there.

[zCyl]

The reason it doesn't appear to work is the output happened before you even ran it, unless you didn't run it, See?? .... Look in your shell history silly man ...

.bash_future?

2038

[Kamokazi]

So, is this why I keep getting lots of spam email from 2038?