Newsgroups: sci.physics,alt.sci.physics.new-theories,sci.edu,sci.skeptic,sci.astro,sci.space,sci.fractals Path: columba.udac.uu.se!sunic!pipex!howland.reston.ans.net!europa.eng.gtefsd.com!library.ucla.edu!csulb.edu!csus.edu!netcom.com!sarfatti From: sarfatti@netcom.com (Jack Sarfatti) Subject: re:Kip Thorne's New Book Message-ID: Followup-To: sci.physics Keywords: time warps Organization: NETCOM On-line Communication Services (408 241-9760 guest) Date: Tue, 5 Apr 1994 01:16:07 GMT Lines: 99 Xref: columba.udac.uu.se sci.physics:4955 alt.sci.physics.new-theories:561 sci.edu:240 sci.skeptic:4548 sci.astro:3870 sci.fractals:407 Revised and Expanded 2nd Draft Kip Thorne's Time Warps Comments on his new book BLACK HOLES & TIME WARPS (W.W. Norton, 1994) by Jack Sarfatti (sarfatti@netcom.com). Thorne is Feynman Professor of Theoretical Physics at Cal Tech. I only discuss here Chapter 14 Wormholes and Time Machines. The bottom line is that we need to understand quantum gravity before we know whether electromagnetic quantum vacuum fluctuations travelling backward in time through the wormhole will destroy it making practical time travel impossible. Stephen Hawking bets that this is the case (i.e., his chronology protection conjecture). Thorne refuses to bet and I squarely oppose Hawking based on the ultra anthropic conjecture that the universe is self-created by advanced intelligence using primordial wormhole time machines from the Big Bang in addition to communication on nonlocal quantum connections. The latter is forbidden by standard quantum mechanics in the absence of the kind of "self-reference" discussed by David Albert. It is not clear what happens if there is "self-reference" of the kind we experience in our own consciousness. It is also known that nonlinear corrections to the quantum laws (which may be caused by gravitation) allow such communication. ----------------------------------------------------------------------- re: Kip Thorne's Time Warps #2 Comments on his new book BLACK HOLES & TIME WARPS (W.W. Norton, 1994) by Jack Sarfatti (sarfatti@netcom.com). Although Steven Hawking proposes the chronology protection conjecture that time travel to the past is forbidden in the yet to be understood quantum gravity, he does write in the forward to Thorne's book: "There is much we still don't know, such as what happens to objects and information that fall into a black hole. Do they reemerge elsewhere in the Universe, or in another universe? And can we warp space and time so that one can travel back in time? These questions are part of our ongoing quest to understand the Universe. Maybe someone will come back from the future and tell us the answers." Some interesting relevant recent papers in new physics: Leonard Susskind .... "Gedankenexperiments involving black holes" in Jan 15, 1994 Phys. Rev. D. One possibility that Susskind does not consider is that the in-falling information carried by subluminal and luminal mass-energy gets converted to superluminal exotic (possibly dark) matter and even undergoes a metrical signature change from Lorentzian to Euclidean. e.g. "Why is spacetime Lorentzian?" by Carlini and Greenstein in same issue of Phys Rev D. See also Sandu Popesu "Bell's Inequalities vs Teleportation: What is nonlocality?" Phys. Rev Lett 7 Feb 94 p. 797 perhaps, somehow, the information is teleported (1) out of black holes via the virtual electron-positron pairs at the horizon? S Kar ... also in Jan 15 94 Phys Rev D shows that nonstatic Lorentzian wormholes are possible without exotic matter that violates the weak energy condition (i.e. negative energy in local frame of light rays passing through the wormhole or radial tension > energy density in frame fixed to throat of wormhole etc). Finally, of interest, is Hegerfeldt's "Causality Problems for Fermi's 2 Atoms" in Phys Rev Lett 31 Jan 1994 in which we find: "If the effect .. is real, it could in principle be used for superluminal signals" provided that source and detector are in disjoint spacelike separated regions with no wave function overlap. In any case it may well be that quantum gravity permits the escape of in-falling information faster-than-light from black holes, and that time travel to the past through wormholes is not only possible but is necessary for the Universe to come into being from the future in such a way that we will be created and evolve in a self-creating globally self- consistent loop-in-time. (1) Alice is given a spin 1/2 particle in state & unknown to her. She helps Bob (far away from Alice) prepare another spin 1/2 particle in the identical but unknown state &. Alice is not allowed to send her particle directly to Bob, nor can she send a different particle that has interacted with her particle. However, Alice and Bob do share a nonlocally correlated pair of particles in a spin singlet state. Alice can make a local measurement on both her particle and her half of the correlated pair. She can communicate the result of her measurement to Bob causally using a light signal. Therefore, teleportation is not faster-than-light communication. Bob is able to reconstruct the state & because he receives both classical information on the causal light signal and nonlocal quantum information due to the entanglement of the shared pair between them. Violation of Bell's inequalities and teleportation are two aspects of nonlocality but they are not equivalent aspects. Hawking has suggested that quantum gravity is fundamentally nonunitary making pure states into mixed states. If that is true, then faster-than- light communication will be possible if there are mesoscopic quantum- gravitational effects possibly because of some kind of hypothetical fractal self-similarity that de-amplifies the ultra-high energy Planck scale down to very low energy perceptable scales. Penrose speculates that this may happen in human consciousness in his book THE EMPEROR'S NEW MIND.