Physicist Needs $$ For Experiment

In this new century, we have been presented with many new advancements in technology from Ipods, and high tech cell phones to the microwave gun, but somewhere out there in a high tech laboratory, there is a genius working on an incredible idea: Time travel!

Now, he is way far away from creating any worm holes, warps, or machine that will allow one to travel through that fourth dimension. No, his work is only a little more than a brilliant idea.
John Cramer, a physicist from the University of Washington has devised a test which involves using a crystal to split a photon, a light particle, into two reduced-energy photons that -- through careful manipulation -- could reveal a flash of time traveling backward. However it seems that the old Cramer himself is running out of time.

He needs 20,000 dollars if he is to continue this interesting research. So he applied to to agencies that have previously shown interest in far fetched ideas, most notably the World Wide Web, better known as the Internet. These are the NASA Institute for Advanced Concepts (NIAC) and the Defense Advanced Research Projects Agency (DARPA). Just to show how far they will go, NIAC took science fiction author Arthur C. Clarke's idea of a geosynchronous elevator into space seriously, while DARPA recently sent out requests for proposals from researchers interested in developing shape-shifting, liquid robots (something like Terminator 2) as well as cyborg insects.
But time travel backward, testing a fundamental paradox in physics is too weird even for such people that believed in creating an android from a crazy science fiction film. "In 20 years, nobody has been able to tell me why this can't work," Cramer said. "They just say it can't work like that. It's unacceptable."

So far, In the basement of the UW's Astronomy and Physics building, the physicist and his student, Skander Mzali, are making do with what they can find in the lab. What Cramer hopes to be able to do is split a photon, sending two "entangled" photons down two very different pathways of varying lengths using fiber-optic cables. Photons can exist in either particle or wave forms. The outcome can be manipulated by placement of detectors.

Because the photons are entangled, however one is detected (i.e., whether as a particle or a wave) also will determine the form taken by the other. But by running one photon through a 10-kilometer spool of optic cable, the second photon will be delayed 50 microseconds.

In short, moving the location of the detector for the delayed photon to change it from wave to particle would also change the first photon -- according to standard quantum theory. For this to happen, some kind of signal has to go backward in time.

Cramer says Stephen Hawking was wrong about time, "Hawking has this 'arrow of time' idea in which he argues that time can only advance in one direction, forward," Cramer said. "It's appealing, elegant and certainly makes sense intuitively" he noted, "because this is the only way we experience time."

Sadly, in our "performance-based" approach to funding research, time, if not proven yet to sometimes run backward, is running out on the UW experiment seeking evidence of "quantum retrocausality." They will lose the lab space soon if they can't move forward with the project "We're about to hit the wall if we don't get funding," he said. "It would be a shame because even if this doesn't work, I'm sure we'd learn something from trying."

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