Funding an unusual science experiment
John Cramer is a
Physicist at the University of Washington as well as a well-known
Science Fiction writer. He had an idea for an unusual little experiment but couldn't get funding for it. A cheap experiment too -- lasers, fiber optics; the whole thing fits on a tabletop and costs under $100,000 - a pittance in today's Scientific budgets.
What did he do? He went public and so far has raised over $35K
From the
Seattle Post-Intelligencer:
Public donates to UW scientist to fund backward-in-time research
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.
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.
A bit more about the experiment:
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.
Very cool! Garage science at its best...
Posted by DaveH at June 12, 2007 5:52 PM