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."

I'm all for the scientific method...

[DanQuixote]

But I also admire folks who can inspire others toward some dream...

ROI

[Doc Ruby]

If time travel can be produced, it's worth (asymptotically) nearly any amount of investmemnt to get it.

List of investors?

[MECC]

I wonder if there's a way to get the names of the people who gave him money, and their contact info.

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

[Chris Burke]

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.

Re:obligatory

[Intron]

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

Remember, folks...

[InfinityWpi]

Not every crackpot is really a brilliant genius... but almost all brilliant geniuses were, at one point, considered to be crackpots.

Re:ROI

[cowscows]

Not to mention that there are plenty of people out there for which $35,000 is really a drop in the bucket. Giving that money to this guy is most likely money wasted, but if that money was most likely just going to sit in the bank with a few other tens of millions of dollars until you die, then you haven't really lost anything worth worrying about anyways.

If you've got more money than you know what to do with, why not take a couple long-shot bets?

Re:obligatory

[CommunistHamster]

The trouble is that there is no such thing as universal simultaneity. What clock do we measure by when measuring "before the message was created"?

These People aren't Investors

[m1a1]

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.

Two counterpoints

[BeanThere]

(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.

Re:for chists sake

[wes33]

don't need a link: in QFT it is true that space like separated operators commute - so no communication; in short, you can't make what you want happen at the other end of the "channel" even though there is a correlation between what is happening at both ends. OTH, so far as I know, this condition on the operators is just "written in" to the the theory so I think it's definitely worth testing

Time?

[lymond01]

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.

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

[magarity]

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.

Re:Maybe they did...

[HTH NE1]

Invest a penny at the beginning at time, and before you know it, you'll be dining at Milliways.

Better check that (1) your bank will continue to exist for the requisite period ("Do you take Visa?" "Visa hasn't existed for 500 years." "American Express?" "600 years." "Discover card?" "Sorry, we don't take Discover."), and (2) that they don't have restrictions that you (a) maintain a minimum balance or (b) maintain a minimum account activity where, if either is violated, they start taking away your money (and, in the case of (b), do it retroactively from the month of your last transaction--yes, some banks do do this), and (3) their policies won't change over the course of your investment.

Re:ROI

[HTH NE1]

Not necessarily. It could enter into a self-sustaining stable harmonic state where it is alternately discovered and not discovered, or create a pocket self-contained universe where dinosaurs and lizard-men live and time travel is regularly performed inside special pylons using grids of glowing colored rocks.

Comment removed

[account_deleted]

Comment removed based on user account deletion

Re:Its not that far fetched.

[bigdavex]

That was beautiful. I laughed out loud.

Re:A problem of abstraction

[PresidentEnder]

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.

But what if you send the message anyway, remembering that it was the reason you avoided the mistake in the first^h^h^h^h^hsecond^h^h^h^h^hthird^h^h^h^h^hohda mnit place?

Re:ahahaha...

[Chowderbags]

That's funny. I had no idea that velocity was defined otherwise. It is still v = dx/dt, is it not? Whoever thought that your post was insightful needs a lesson in reading comprehension.

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.