Tuesday, June 12, 2007
Last updated 7:24 a.m. PT
Experiment may be 'weird,' but donors think it's pretty cool
By TOM PAULSON
P-I REPORTER
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 |
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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
