Originally posted on sciy.org by Ron Anastasia on Tue 12 Jun 2007 10:30 PM PDT
Tuesday, June 12, 2007
Last updated 7:24 a.m. PT
Public donates to UW scientist to fund backward-in-time research
Experiment may be 'weird,' but donors think it's pretty cool
It can take a village to save science -- a village that so far includes a Las Vegas music mogul, Kirkland rocket scientist, Port Townsend artist, Bothell chemist, Louisiana gas-and-oil man with a place in Port Angeles and a Savannah, Ga., computer programmer.
The public has stepped forward with cash to boldly go where nobody in the mainstream scientific establishment wants to go -- or, at least, to have to pay for the attempt to go.
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 | Andy Rogers / P-I | |
| John Cramer, a physicist at the University of Washington, is reflected among some of the materials he's using for an experiment that challenges the traditional concept of time. The public has donated $35,000 to his research. | ||
Backward. In time, that is.
A University of Washington scientist who could not obtain funding from traditional research agencies to test his idea that light particles act in reverse time has received more than $35,000 from folks nationwide who didn't want to see this admittedly far-fetched idea go unexplored.
"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. "It's outrageous to me that talented scientists have to go looking for a few bucks to do anything slightly outside the box."
What John Cramer is proposing to do is certainly outside the box. It's about quantum retrocausality.
"He's looking into the fundamental qualities of the universe," said Denny Gmur, a scientist who works for a biotechnology firm in Bothell. "I had $2,000 set aside to buy myself a really nice guitar, but I thought, you know, I'd rather support something that's really mind-boggling and cool."
Almost everything in quantum theory is mind-boggling and outside the box, sometimes transforming the box into an inverted spherical cube of infinite volume or forcing an entirely new definition of the essence of boxness.
Cramer, a physicist, for decades has been interested in resolving a fundamental paradox of quantum mechanics, the theory that accounts for the behavior of matter and energy at subatomic levels. It's called the Einstein-Podolsky-Rosen paradox.
It was set up by Albert Einstein (and two other guys named Rosen and Podolsky) in the 1930s to try to prove the absurdity of quantum theory. Einstein didn't like quantum theory, especially one aspect of it he ridiculed as "spooky action at a distance" because it seemed to require subatomic particles interacting faster than the speed of light.
However, experimental evidence has continued to pile up demonstrating the spooky action. Two subatomic particles split from a single particle do somehow instantaneously communicate no matter how far apart they get in space and time. The phenomenon is described as "entanglement" and "non-local communication."
For example, one high-energy photon split by a prism into two lower-energy photons could travel into space and separate by many light years. If one of the photons is somehow forced up, the other photon -- even if impossibly distant -- will instantly tilt down to compensate and balance out both trajectories.
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.
"It could involve signaling, or communication, in reverse time," he said. Physicists John Wheeler and Richard Feynman years ago promoted this idea of "retrocausality" as worth considering. Cramer's version aimed at using retrocausality to resolve the EPR paradox is dubbed (by him) the "transactional interpretation of quantum mechanics."
Most physicists, such as the celebrated cosmologist Stephen Hawking, still believe time can move only in one direction -- forward. Cramer contends there is no hard and fast reason why.
He has proposed a relatively simple bench-top experiment using lasers, prisms, splitters, fiber-optic cables and other gizmos to first see if he can detect "non-local" signaling between entangled photons. He hopes to get it going in July. If this succeeds, he hopes to get support from "traditional funding sources" to really scale up and test for photons communicating in reverse time.
It may be important to note, at this point, that Cramer is not crazy.
On Sunday, he began his annual stint running particle physics experiments at the Brookhaven National Laboratory's Relativistic Heavy Ion Collider. He and others at the national lab use the supercollider to smash together particles, create the hottest matter ever made by humans and study things such as quarks or other subatomic particles.
Cramer, who also writes science fiction books as a hobby, earlier worked at CERN, the world's largest particle physics laboratory, on the border between France and Switzerland. In the 1980s, he was director of the UW's nuclear physics laboratory and today remains a well-respected experimental physicist.
"I'm not crazy," he confirmed. "I don't know if this experiment will work, but I can't see why it won't. People are skeptical about this, but I think we can learn something, even if it fails."
Not too long ago, Cramer thought he would not even be allowed to fail.
None of the standard scientific funding agencies wanted any part of the project. NASA's Institute for Advanced Concepts sent Cramer a rejection letter, adding it was getting out of the advanced concepts business anyway -- now that most of the space agency's money is going to the federal government's renewed push into manned spaceflight.
The most creative branch of the military-science-industrial complex (known as DARPA, Defense Advanced Research Projects Agency) also rejected Cramer's proposal. Officials at DARPA told the UW physicist his experiment is "too weird" -- even though they recently gave money in support of a project aimed at creating Terminatorlike liquid robots.
"I thought we were going to have to pull the plug," Cramer said. But when word of his funding plight went out across the Internet a few months ago after a Seattle P-I article, people like Rudman and Gmur began contacting the UW to see if they could lend some support.
"Heck, if it works we can go back in time and get our money back," laughed John Crow, a businessman who splits his time between his gas-and-oil business in Shreveport and a home in Port Angeles.
Crow donated $3,000 because he found Cramer's approach too fascinating not to try.
"I'm just a crass businessman, but in business we know high risk offers high reward," he said. "This isn't that much money to find out if time can go both forward and backward."
Walter Kistler, a retired physicist and rocket scientist who started Redmond-based Kistler Aerospace, donated $5,000. Kistler's company struggled for many years unsuccessfully promoting the concept of reusable rockets, even going bankrupt once, but recently won a NASA contract.
"I know how difficult it can be to get people to even consider new or unusual ideas," he said. "Even Einstein had trouble accepting the basic ideas of quantum theory. I've talked to professor Cramer, and what he is trying to do could be very important."
Kistler said he was overjoyed to hear that other people thought this was worth supporting.
"Artists have experienced non-local space all along, we just can't prove it," said Richard Miller, an artist and photographer in Port Townsend. Miller, who prefers not to disclose the amount of his donation, said he's not worried about the strong possibility of failure here.
"I would say the predicted failure of this project is probably a good omen," he said. "Most predictions are wrong."
Cramer said it's possible that the primary goal of his experiment could fail and yet still produce something of value. Some new subtlety about the nature of entanglement could be revealed, he said, even if the photons don't engage in measurable non-local communication. The "disentanglement" itself, he said, could be quite revealing.
"It wouldn't be as nice as a positive result, but it would certainly be interesting and publishable," Cramer said. If there is an interesting negative result or a half-positive result, he said he will buy more precise equipment to see if he can tease out what's happening. Cramer has all the money he needs for this phase, but he hopes to see a second phase.
In the music business, said Rudman, the Las Vegas music mogul, most records they produce don't do well. In the vernacular, he said, "They stiff."
"But the rare hits we get every once in a while pay for all the stiffs, and then some," Rudman said. "If this stiffs, it stiffs. But, man, you've got to try, don't you? You've got to be willing to take the risk of being wrong to find something new."
HOW TO DONATE
The University of Washington has set up a special account to which individuals or groups can contribute funds for John Cramer's experiment.
Tax-deductible contributions to the project may be made by contacting Jennifer Raines, UW Department of Physics, at jraines@phys.washington.edu, or mailing a check made out to the University of Washington with a notation on the check directing deposit to the account for "Non-Local Quantum Communication Experiment" to:
Jennifer Raines, Administrator
Department of Physics
University of Washington
Box 351560
Seattle, WA 98195-1560
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