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."

for chists sake

[brunascle]

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.

Re:for chists sake

[tylersoze]

Uhh this isn't FTL, the information is sent through advanced waves at exactly the speed of light.

Transactional interpretation isn't crazy

[tylersoze]

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.

http://www.npl.washington.edu/npl/int_rep/ti_over/ ti_over.html [washington.edu]
http://www.npl.washington.edu/npl/int_rep/tiqm/TI_ toc.html [washington.edu]
http://www.npl.washington.edu/npl/int_rep/dtime/no de2.html [washington.edu]

Re:I'm all for the scientific method...

[WalksOnDirt]

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 [washington.edu]

Re:Transactional interpretation isn't crazy

[DirtySouthAfrican]

And for those who don't want to read all that... http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Transactional_interpr etation [wikipedia.org] It sounds very much like conventioanl QFT viewed through 1930s eyes... Especially the part about waves cancelling. Expectation values of commutation relations vanish (decay exponentially) outside the lightcone where they are acausal.

Re:I'm all for the scientific method...

[Anonymous Coward]

If $35k buys him one experiment that disproves his theory, then he's saved 9x that much. If his experiment shows that his theory produces reproducible results, then he's that much closer to convincing people he's not a nut.

The question is whether $35k is enough to fund one experiment.

Not a crackpot.

[sconeu]

This is based on the Transactional Interpretation [wikipedia.org] of Quantum Mechanics.

It's based on hard science, and makes testable predictions. TFS grabbed the most sensational lines from TFA.

Re:obligatory

[brunascle]

i think you're thinking of the transactional interpretation [wikipedia.org] which is apparently what the researcher subscribes to.

i actually like the many-worlds theory. i find it easier to grasp.

Re:What is time, anyway?

[Kam Solusar]

Everyone is overlooking the rather large elephant in the room. What is time, anyway?

Well, according to the latest Doctor Who episode:

People assume that time is a strict progression of cause to effect, but actually, from a non-linear, non-subjective viewpoint, it's more like a big ball of wibbly-wobbly, timey-wimey stuff.

I think that's as good as any other explanation (until some senator finally reveals the truth: that time is actually a series of temporal tubes...)

Schrodinger's Kittens

[Anonymous Coward]

If you really want to understand what John Cramer is talking about, read his article here [washington.edu]. John Gribbin [amazon.com] also his a good description of John Cramer's theory in his book Schrodinger's Kittens [amazon.com].

Re:obligatory

[sconeu]

I'd say he subscribes to it... He *developed* it!

Re:ahahaha...

[Chowderbags]

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.

This won't work

[kmac06]

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 [washington.edu], and immediately recognized the flaw in the experiment. He's trying to use a quantum eraser (wiki [wikipedia.org] of quantum eraser, and link [sunysb.edu] 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.