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To Dawn
 I wish you wouldn’t keep appearing and
vanishing so suddenly: you make one quite
giddy,’ said Alice. `All right,’ said the Cat; and
this time it vanished quite slowly, beginning
with the end of the tail, and ending with the
grin, which remained some time after the rest of
it had gone.
LEWIS CARROLL

M y wife has lately suggested the plot for a SF

story with a time-traveler as the hero.
A physicist at the University of Minnesota, so the
story goes, is working on a project to travel back in
time. At home he often goes through albums with
pictures of his father – a spitting image of himself.
What transpires is that the Scientist is the father – the
actual son had died in a preventable accident at an
early age, when still going to college. What happened
was that in his research of time travel the man had
found a way to travel into the future. But when he
conducted the experiment, he wasn’t yet a father, his
missing family history he only learned from the
archives after his arrival in the present. He had a son
he never knew. In fact he had had a wife he never
knew. But then, how could there be a son? Didn’t the
“father” disappear from the records before he met the
woman recorded as his wife? There is only one
possible answer to all this.
Using the birth certificate of the deceased son, the
time traveler prepares a new identity, with social
security number, credit cards etc. and continues his
research with the aim to travel back in time. He is
confident that he will succeed. After all the records do
show that he had a son and a wife. But he is not just
attempting a reunion with a family he never knew, he
is hoping to change the past and prevent the fatal
accident that had killed his son.
I may actually write the thing, but before I can go
down to business, I have to suffer every SF writer’s
bane and figure out a plausible way of propelling my
hero back and forth in time. I said “plausible,” not
“possible!” Possible would be great but sometimes
fiction, even fiction of the more realistic kind, has to
make due with the second best.
Magic of course is not an option and the Bermuda
Triangle is a lazy copout. On the other hand, these
days, physicists are beginning seriously to consider
time travel as a viable option.
Physicists toying with the idea of time travel speak
of harnessing hypothetical “wormholes” or even
suggest to come dangerously near to the next black
hole in our neighborhood in order to warp sufficiently
the underpinning fabric of the Universe, the thing the
jargon uses to label as “space-time.” Exotic physics,
“dark matter” and “super-stings” are prominent
features in these speculations, yet, even if leaving
alone little details as centuries of travel time to the
next available wormhole, none of these gentlemen
making those proposals seems to pay any attention to
the electricity bill. The annual budged of China, the
USA and the whole of Europe will not suffice to
provide even a fraction of the funding needed to
construct, build and send on a mission the spaceship
and train its crew. Besides, my story begins in the
early thirties of the 20th century, when people messed
around with vacuum tubes and soldered copper
circuits on clunky motherboards being still blissfully
oblivious of transistors and computer chips. The
industries skimmed the cream from what the states
had funded on educational institutions, but
nevertheless the budgets of the science departments
at the universities were absolutely pathetic. Pencil and
paper was still the most important tool in the
physicist’s workshop. In America two autodidacts, the
Wright brothers, Orville (1871 – 1948) and Wilbur (1867 –
1912) invented virtually single-handed all the still valid
principles and elements of modern flight, and did so in
a shop not larger than my garage. In all their years of
tinkering and testing they spent altogether a thousand
dollars.
In other words I need to think about something
inexpensive, something you can put together in your
own basement. Of course in the real world sending a
man on a trajectory to a different time will be at least
as expensive as the first man on the moon, and should
this trajectory lead into the past the time-traveler –
should we call him a chrononaut? – may find himself
being stranded there for good, and be it simply for
lack of necessary resources to engineer his return.
 In our days of CERN and billion dollar super-
colliders, powered by millions of giga-volts, this may
sound quaint and naïve, but believe it or not, nuclear
physics too have risen from rather humble beginnings.
In 2010 we are sending tiny particles through miles of
insulated tubing towards the collision point and at
enormous costs smash them into other particles
hoping to glean from the general disintegration
valuable insights in the inner elements holding
together not just an atom but even the entire
Universe. Yet the very first time, this kind of
experiment was conducted, the whole installation
fitted on the tabletop of an ordinary office desk; and it
didn’t cost your mortgage. On December 17, in 1939,
Otto Hahn conducted his celebrated experiment, the
“radium-barium-mesothorium-fractionation,” the first
fission of an atom. It didn’t require much energy and
there was little or no danger of radioactive fallout – a
miniscule flash of X-rays, that was all. In fact the
experiment was not even considered to be physics.
Otto Hahn (1879 – 1978) was a chemist, and in 1944 he
was awarded for his experiment the Nobel Price for
Chemistry, at a time when Germany was at war with
the rest of the world. Hahn had remained in Germany,
fully aware that his experiment had opened the road
to nuclear fission. Yet Albert Einstein was aware of it
too and undersigned the letter to President Roosevelt
that launched the Manhattan Project. The Roosevelt’s
administration managed to keep completely under
raps an industrial operation involving no less than
120.000 people and the determined funding this would
require. The moneys passed unnoticed the eagle eyes
on the senate committee, which auditioned
Washington’s wartime spending. Meanwhile in
Germany the scientists and a few hundred assistants
and laboratory technicians had to make due with a
widely scattered operation living from the
breadcrumbs that fell from the desks of at least five
different institutions in Government and army.
Heisenberg was a personal protégé of the Reichsführer
SS, while some of his most important researchers were
funded by the postal service. Yet in Germany nuclear
research was on nobody’s list a top priority, not even
of the Wehrmacht. It became a priority only after
things had taken a turn to absolute desperation. Under
such conditions the outcome was a foregone
conclusion; the Americans came first.
I am not a physicist; I grew up with the contention of
Immanuel Kant (1724 – 1804) that our spatial and
temporal intuitions and the true nature of time and
space are two different things. The empirical world
beyond our senses, does not know of “order” and
“chaos.” These terms are purely cognitive categories.
Our instincts about time and space, finality and
infinity, are the offshoot of the operational logic that
enables us to cogitate perceptions. Space and time,
Kant explained, “are merely a form of intuition for the
external, but not real objects in itself; it is not a correlate of
phenomena, it is the form, our faculty of perception
uses, to present phenomena to our understanding.”
When we are not looking, Kant suggested, the world
“out there” seems suspended in a timeless
permanence. What kind of permanence this might be
has found expression in a lecture by the cosmologist
Professor Stephen Hawking (*1942). In 1978 he visited
the Vatican to receive the Pius XI Medal from the
Pontifical Academy of Science. In his book A History of
Time, Hawking claims that Pope John Paul II tried to
discourage him and other scientists from trying to
figure out how the universe began. “I was glad then,”
Hawking said, “that he did not know the subject of the talk
I had just given at the conference – the possibility that
space-time was finite but had no boundary, which means
that it had no beginning, no moment of creation.” In that
alleged lecture, Stephen Hawking brought forward the
scenario of a universe expanding from Big Bang
towards a maximum and then falling back into the
“big crunch” without actually doing either.
Instead of a linear progression, he proposed the
layout of a Universe suspended in a dimension of
simultaneous occurrences beyond our cognitive
categories of time and space. “The quantum theory of
gravity has opened up a new possibility,” he argued, “in
which there would be no boundary to space-time and so
there would be no need to specify the behavior at the
boundary. One could say: ‘The boundary condition of the
universe is that it has no boundary.’ The universe would be
completely self-contained and not affected by anything
outside itself. It would neither be created nor destroyed. It
would just be.” In Hawking’s analogy the Universe
expands from the pole – symbolizing Big Bang –
towards the equator, and further on shrinks back to
the point of collapse at the other pole. Yet we continue
on our travel, reach again the equator and then the
opposite pole, and so on, indefinitely. Yet this is not
meant to be the story of a cyclical event but the travel
through the features of a one-off permanence. The
Universe, says Professor Hawking, “if completely self-
contained, having no boundary or edge,” would have
“neither beginning nor end: what place, then, for a creator.
If the laws of physics could break down at the beginning of
the Universe, why couldn’t they break down anywhere? To
admit a singularity is to deny a universal predictability to
physics, and, hence ultimately, to reject the competence of
science to understand the Universe.”
That is an interesting statement by the very man
who made a career out of the research of black holes,
which are physical singularities by definition.
Subsequently Professor Hawking dedicated his life to
unraveling the physical features of black holes. He
came to the conclusion that these singularities have a
limited lifespan that ends in a bang. I think it was
Meister Eckhard (1260 – 1328), who was the first to
suggest a world where every event is laid out
simultaneously in time-withdrawn permanence.
We know of course the exact age of the Universe
even in the version of Eckhard. According to Johannes
Kepler (1571 – 1630), the Old Potter opened for business
on Sunday, the 27th of April in 3877 BC, at 11.00 am,
central European time. Drinks were on the house.
What the Good Book fails to tell us is how many
prototypes of the present Universe had been discarded
in the process of creation! It might have been quite a
few – think of Noah and the Ark.
 In other words this world – complete with the light
reaching us from the galaxies in the Virgo cluster,
apparently after billions of years, a world with fossils
of dinosaurs embedded in the rocks, with Professor
Hawking lecturing the Vatican on a Universe without
origin, and with me typing at this essay and believing
to recall that only yesterday I’d arrived in Singapore
after twelve hours on the plane – it could have sprung
into existence only five seconds ago, and none of us
would be any the wiser for it. Among the faithful
opinions remain divided whether the Old Potter
merely dropped the ball for the kickoff and then
withdrew to the terraces for tea and scones, or
actually remained on the grounds for a spot of
umpiring.
These “grounds,” however seem to cover an awful lot
of real estate; yet to the mathematician even “empty”
space is a manifold with intrinsic metrics. The physical
properties of mass, charge and velocity of the objects
traveling through such region correlate with these
metrical values. The astronomer Ptolemy (87 – 150 AD) –
yes that Ptolemy, the one who placed Earth at the
center of the Universe – understood already that space
is not an entity separate from the matter inhabiting it.
Based on ideas like this Albert Einstein (1879 – 1955)
postulated that the element of time has to be included
in the composition as well, and referred to what is out
there as the “Space-time-Continuum” or “space-time.” A
continuum, however, that seems to expand! In 1929,
Edwin Hubble (1889 – 1953) had noticed a uniform shift
towards red in the light-signature of the most distant
galaxies and clusters. Since the light arriving from an
object moving through deep space is either shifted
towards blue when it is the light of an approaching
object – like the Andromeda galaxy – or it is shifting
towards red when it belongs to objects hurtling away
from our position, the likely explanation seems a
universal motion of the most distant objects away
from the observer. The more distant the object, the
more pronounced the red-shift, the escape velocity
seems to increase. The factor of this increase is called
the Hubble constant. When it was discovered in 1926,
it had a value of 500 kilometers per second per mega-
parsec. The subsequent corrections of this
“constant’s” value have prompted the astronomer
Halton Arp to pass the sarcastic remark: “During the
past half-century this variable has gradually declined to
50.3 kilometers per second per mega-parsec. The radius of
the Universe is inversely proportional to the magnitude of
this variable. Accordingly the Universe is expanding by a
factor of 100 per century. Dividing this factor into the above
ratio discloses that the expansion began here on Earth 961
years ago, or 1015 AD during the dark ages” (Halton Arp,
‘Extragalactic Astronomy,’ Science, 17 Dec. 1971, vol. 174, p. 1189) .
That sounds absurd, yet we may be sitting at the
center of this apparent “expansion,” for a good
reason.
As long as the boundaries of the Universe exceed the
observer’s horizon, any observer’s horizon, no matter
where he is located, whether here or in one of the
Sloan Galaxies, such observer occupies the center of
his particular observational horizon. There is no
preference of one observer over the other; all
observers are equal in that they occupy the center of
their observational horizons. So, if we envisage gravity
as a pulling force, then in a very much larger Universe,
let alone in an infinite Universe, the tidal force from
“outside” on every point along every observer’s
horizon must by far exceed the gravitational pull from
“inside.” In other words, the light-signature of objects
closer to the observational horizon should be
uniformly shifted towards red, and the Hubble
constant rather stands for the value of gravitational
pull from the observational horizon’s outside, than for
an inert escape velocity.
The current value for the Hubble constant is seventy
kilometers per second per mega-parsec, “with an
uncertainty of ten percent.” This means that a galaxy
appears to be moving 160,000 miles per hour faster for
every 3.3 million light-years distance from Earth. If
this were to indicate an expansion, the Universe would
be rapidly dispersing into an ever-thinner cloud of
nothing, leaving behind merely the debris of
microwaves.
The theorists of Big Bang like to present this debris
as the fossilized evidence for the initial bang. For them
it is the clincher for their theory but it would be
difficult to concoct any alternative cosmology without
some or other form of black body radiation lingering
in the background as well. It is a requirement by the
second law of thermodynamics. Physicists use the
term “entropy” to categorize the irretrievable
consumption of energy. In their parlance, they have a
loose way to identify the degree of entropy with a
state of order or disorder. Yet what really happens is
that energy is burned whether we wage war or build a
palace; the result is exactly the same: an increase in
entropy. Entropy is quantified in units of energy per
units of temperature. In a locomotive the steam
pushes a piston until the energy from the fuel heating
the water in the boiler is consumed. There is no viable
way to reclaim the residual heat dispersed into the
environment after the steam has done its work.
Entropy has increased. Energy spent is spent for good.
The entropy of the entire Universe is moving towards
“a maximum” (Rudolf Clausius, 1822 – 1888). So in every
conceivable scenario, there always have to be
microwaves in the background, whether it all started
at the blink of an eye or whether since eternity the
stars in the Universe slowly burn away, leaving behind
debris of black body radiation.
In fact the very presence of this radiation should put
a question mark on the concept of Big Bang as an
event with a limited time frame – the present
calculations allow for some thirteen billion years. Yet
no matter into what direction we look, the background
temperature is pretty much the same everywhere,
roughly three degree Kelvin with very minor
fluctuations. How can that be? Since the initial bang
there was just not enough time for this radiation to zip
across the Universe and level out at the same
universal average.
An affirmation of Big Bang would also require the
Universe to look different in the past. There should be
noticeably fewer heavy elements in the spectrum of
ancient stars. Yet Galaxies from twelve billion years
ago show the familiar distribution of stellar ages and a
similar spectrum of chemical elements just like our
Milky Way. As recent as January 2004, the American
Astronomical Society confirmed that the Universe of
billions of years ago and in distances marked by high
red shift in the spectrum is of a very similar
composition than our immediate cosmic
neighborhood. The observed superabundance of
deuterium, helium-3, helium-4, and lithium-7, may
have been the product of a more “local” collision
between regions of matter and antimatter each
exceeding the size of the observed Universe.
According to the Nobel laureate Hannes Alfven this
would create a superheated state and a rapid
expansion of the debris into the space surrounding the
area of annihilation, giving cause to the observed
nuclear synthesis. The model does not invoke any
exotic physics and employs well-understood
electromagnetic forces and gravity. (When I hear the
term “dark matter” I feel like smelling burning flesh.)
The second law of thermodynamics suggests a
straight arrow of time that has only one direction,
from the point of origin towards us and into the
future, since the passage of “time” is equivalent to the
irreversible consumption of energy, which gradually
should increase the overall entropy of the Universe,
would it not expand at an increasing rate – a
contraction of the Universe and Professor Hawking‘s
“Big Crunch” is not really in the cards.
 So what is really out there? I mean, what is out there
when nobody is looking and trying to make sense of
what his senses communicate to his instincts and
ideas? What exactly is “gravity?”
One of the difficulties for cosmologists these days is
to establish a common denominator between quantum
mechanics and Einstein’s theory of general relativity.
One undisputed feature in the quantum world is the
Planck length, meaning that nothing in the Universe
can be smaller than 16.163×10-36 meters or 53.027×10-36
ft. This has consequences for the way energy is
dispersing. For instance the coil in a mechanical clock
doesn’t release its energy in a continual flow but in a
series of tiny energy parcels; “time” is equivalent to
entropy, as expressed in the second law of
thermodynamics: so, it doesn’t “flow,” it moves on in
little jerks. Quantum physicists go by the assumption
that actual space out there, even if it appears to be
utterly void, is of a granular structure: each “grain” is
of the size of a Planck length and releases a “virtual”
charge constantly blinking on and off, if it doesn’t get
trapped in the magnetic fields between galaxies and
other cosmic objects and so becomes a more
permanent source of cosmic radiation (Casimir effect).
Like a very fine powder, the otherwise “void”
quantum space has the characteristics of a liquid.
Einstein has taught us to think of space-time as a
light cone reaching into the past towards the focus
point of its origin. The lines of trajectory are
supposedly straight representations of the universal
time standard in a Universe where the signal speed
(light velocity) is the maximum speed limit for
everything that moves. But what if the trajectory of
this arrow of time isn’t all that straight, but some kind
of twisted and entangled curve? What if the nature of
Professor Hawking’s suspended “permanence,” if real,
would be a rather chaotic welter of local time frames,
none completely in sync with the rest of the Universe
but by itself a product of “frame dragging” caused by
various rotational forces?
The mathematician Kurt Gödel (1906 – 1978) is best
known for his theorem of incompleteness: “For any
consistent formal theory that proves arithmetic truths,
there is an arithmetical statement that is true, but not
provable by the theory.” Gödel liked to think that “the
world in which we live is not the only one in which we shall
live or have lived.” I’ve heard the same thing from an
elderly lady on platform four of Waterloo Station.
It was a fleeting encounter between strangers
waiting for their trains. She was already in her
eighties, still upright and tall, a nurse from the Great
War when soldiers still had died of comparably light
injuries simply for the lack of penicillin. She
remembered well and still was full of resentment
against her by now long expired father because he had
objected to her choice of profession. She was a strong
willed no nonsense Yorkshire woman and had no time
to waste with religious nonsense and ideas of a soul
and afterlife. She had seen Alzheimer patients losing
their intellectual faculties one by one and die on her
ward from untreatable dementia. Nothing left of a
soul, nothing to be carried into an afterlife. And yet,
with her train already approaching from the distance,
she still had a surprise in store: “we will be living again,
whether here or on some other planet,” she said, and
noticing the expression on my face, she added, “think
of Beethoven. At night, the four-year-old boy couldn’t keep
his hands from the piano, he brought the music with him.”
We barely had time to say goodbye, her train was
ready to leave, I gave her a wave and never saw her
again, but something inside me made me wish to
agree, and I still like to agree with her, whenever I
remember this encounter.
It was the year of my birth, 1949, when Kurt Gödel
proposed a spinning Universe with no singularities
(what now is labeled to be “black holes”) but allowing
for time travel. The proposition is based on a fudge
factor in Einstein’s field equations, the “cosmological
constant” λ (lambda). The actual value of this constant is
still everybody’s guess and, depending which value we
prefer, it allows for multiple solutions of the same
equations. Since there is no “outside” to the Universe,
nobody “inside,” for lack of a point of reference, will
ever notice the spin. That is, if we fail considering the
inert effects of gravity. For instance on Earth the
rotational velocity increases from zero at the poles to
a speed of some 1,500 km per hour on the equator,
slightly pulling the planet out of its spherical shape.
On a cosmic scale, this means that the rotational
velocity at the “cosmic pole” has to be zero as well,
while the increase towards the “cosmic equator” must
affect the overall distribution of matter in the skies; a
distribution quite similar to the stringy bands of the
weather-systems on Jupiter. And indeed, there are
tantalizing clues right before our telescopes.
The huge void of the “WMAP Cold Spot” could very
well be the equivalent of a “cosmic pole,” if only it
were as empty as it appears in our telescopes. Yet
recent long-range surveys pinpointing with long
exposures at apparently void regions in the most
distant expanses, reveal the existence of a crowded
world of galactic clusters too far away to be picked up
in a normal sweep even by Hubble.
The actual Universe is obviously infinitely vaster and
older than our theorists like to us to think.
Closer to the “cosmic equator” some 150 to 250
million light-years away, there is the “Great
Attractor,” a gravity anomaly within the range of the
Centaurus super-cluster, revealing the existence of a
pile-up of mass equivalent to tens of thousands of
Milky Ways. It is observable by its effect on the motion
of galaxies and their associated clusters across a
region of hundreds of millions of light years. And,
most telling, in 2003, a survey by the ROSAT x-ray
satellite revealed another chain of clusters and
galaxies stringing out in a “cosmic wall” some twelve
billion light years end to end.
Who is to say this could not be the effect of a cosmic
spin? And since virtually everything in this Universe,
from the atom up to galaxies and clusters has a local
spin, dragging with it a section of the surrounding
space-time, this multiplicity of local “frame dragging”
means, that such section, even without the assistance
of exotic physics and fashionable “wormholes,” is not
only dissociating itself from the big tide of the
Universe’s rotation, but is tying together the local past
and present in a twisted light-cone or time-like curve
(CTC), which may give allowance for time travel with
relatively simple means.
In the words of Gödel, “if one can travel to other worlds
of a different time, how can time be the passage from a no
longer existing past to a not yet existing future, when the
physics of a spinning Universe require a form of
“eternalism,” where the future is a foregone affair and the
past embedded in the present because all points in time are
equally valid frames of reference – or equally real.”
For Gödel this anomaly was the crucial point of his
suggestion; he arguably succeeded in proving that
Einstein’s equations of space-time are not consistent
with what we intuitively understand time to be.
Instead it seems that “all cosmological solutions with non-
vanishing density of matter known at present have the
common property, that in a certain sense, they contain an
‘absolute’ time-coordinate owing to the fact that there exists
a one-parametric system of three-spaces everywhere
orthogonal on the world lines of matter. Yet it is easily seen
that the non-existence of such a system of three-spaces is
equivalent with the rotation of matter relative to the
compass of inertia. In this paper I am proposing a solution,
which exhibits such a rotation. A temporal orientation is
defined for the world line of every (real or possible) particle
of matter or light, i.e., it is determined for any two
neighboring points on it which one is earlier. On the other
hand, however, since no uniform temporal ordering of all
point events agreeing in direction with all these individual
orderings exist, there also exist closed time-like lines and it
is theoretically possible in these worlds to travel into the
past, or otherwise to influence the past” (Kurt Gödel, Rotating
Universes in General Relativity, 1950) . In other words the
Universe doesn’t run on a universal standard time –
Einstein’s own assumption and still a basic axiom for
the majority of the proponents of Big Bang – instead,
in Gödel’s Universe time is breaking off locally from
the overall drift of space-time, a phenomenon that we
have learned to address as “frame dragging” (see
below).
Einstein himself was generous enough to
acknowledge that his friend Kurt Gödel had raised new
and disturbing questions about the nature of time.
Since then physicists have tried without success to
challenge Gödel’s physics or at least find a missing
element in relativity itself that would rule out the
applicability of Gödel’s results. Because should there
ever occur such a thing as time travel in the future,
the logical assumption of course must be that time-
travelers had and have been visiting us and our past
and present already, perhaps are visiting us right now;
so why don’t we experience any paradoxes?
Such visitor from the future could be a Mossad agent
on a mission to rectify history and kill Hitler. Yet the
analogy with the shifting hotel rooms shows why such
act is leaving the present – our present – unaffected.
Then again, how would we know anyway? Even if a
sudden change in the past could have an effect on the
present, this change would leave us only with the
selective memories that made this change a part of
our history, nobody would notice a difference between
initially two alternative histories. To us it would be
only one history, a story of the sudden death of Hitler
killed by a man who later became a big shot within
Mossad’s organization. Of course that’s not the current
story in our books, but who knows what the world of
our grandchildren will be like and what will happen to
their recorded memories? Even if history is the story
of undeniable facts, should these facts experience a
change, it will also change the story we take for
history. It is complicated. From the perspective of the
traveler his arrival in the past turns the circumstances
of an ever more distant present – our present – to
events of his personal past; what actually lies in his
future has changed roles with the episodes in his
memory, the time-traveler’s personal timeline disjoins
him from the continuity he is constantly leaving
behind.
But is this really possible? Does the fabric of this
world really open doors to different directions in
time? Based on quantum mechanics, as far as it seems
to open a glimpse on the underpinning unity of a
timeless universe, the answer might be yes!
In 1927 Werner Heisenberg (1901 – 1976) discovered
that an energy pulse of high energy and short
amplitude can be used to measure the location of an
electron with a certain degree of precision, yet the
procedure will severely disturb the electron’s
momentum. Conversely measuring the momentum of
an electron with a charge of low amplitude will be less
disturbing, since it is emitting less energy, but then
the electron’s location is eluding a precise
measurement. From this Heisenberg drew the
conclusion of a fundamental uncertainty in the
correlation between momentum and location. A
precise simultaneous measurement of location and
momentum is just not possible, because the measuring
energy pulse can only be of high or low frequency, not
both at the same time. In other words, the physical
correlation between velocity and position apparently
ceases to exist because the agent we use to measure it
interferes and in the process destroys one of the two
data.
But that would be a wrong assumption!
The uncertainty is not created by the inevitably
ham-fisted approach of the measurement as such, but
by the universal fact of Wolfgang Pauli’s “exclusion
principle.” It says that in the entire Universe no two
“fermions” – particles with a property the physicists
call “half-integer spins” – can have the same quantum
number, which means they can never occupy the same
quantum state simultaneously. So if we measure one
part of a quantum state – say, of an electron – we can
never be sure to which complementary quantum state
of all the electrons under observation it exactly
correlates. In the explanation of Niels Bohr this state
of affairs indicates that a quantum state doesn’t exist
before it is created by our observation. This is the
notorious Copenhagen Interpretation.
Albert Einstein was a great skeptic when it came to
the Copenhagen Interpretation of quantum physics.
To lampoon the concept he and the physicists Boris
Podolsky and Nathan Rosen, devised a famous thought
experiment: “It is possible,” they argued, “to obtain a
pair of particles, say electrons, in a so-called singlet state
where their spins cancel out each other to give a total spin
of zero. Let us suppose these particles move widely apart in
opposite directions, after which the spin of the particle to
the left is measured and found to be in the “up” state.
Because the two spins must cancel each other out to zero, it
follows the particle to the right must have “down” spin. In
classical physics, this would be no problem at all. One would
just conclude that the right particle always had “down”
spin from the time of separation. However according to the
Copenhagen interpretation, the spin of the particle to the
left has no definitive value until it is measured, at which
point it must produce an instantaneous effect at the particle
to the right, collapsing its spin wave function into the
opposite or “down” state.” Einstein concluded: “This
bizarre situation demands action-at-a-distance or faster
than light communication, neither of which is acceptable.”
Einstein thought he had made his point.
Nevertheless, in 1964 John S. Bell proposed his “non-
locality” theorem. He accepted Einstein’s ridicule as a
serious proposition and if he was right, this would
mean there is such a thing as instant interaction
regardless, even, of distance. And in 1982, Alain Aspect
set into practice what Einstein had merely meant to
ridicule the idea.
As prescribed by Bell, the experiment polarized
identically a pair of photons and then emitted it into
opposite directions from a single light source at the
center. Each photon passed through a series of
polarized filters of which the angle was rapidly varied.
Using quantum mechanics one can predict the
probability that each photon will pass through a filter
tilted at a given angle. Yet according to the same
theory, the probability of one photon passing through
depends on how both filters are tilted. Aspect made
sure that the filters were sufficiently apart, and that
their reorientation was varied quick enough, so that
no signal from one end could reach the other in time
to affect the second measurement, even if the signal
traveled at the speed of light, the maximum signal
speed possible according to Einstein’s own contention.
In fact, Aspect changed the initial spin every ten
billionth of a second, and made measurements on the
opposite particles when they were separated by four
times the distance that light could travel in the
interval between the alterations of the spin. The
results were as predicted by quantum mechanics.
Some interactions in the particle-world appear to be
immediate and indeed don’t diminish with distance.
Interactions that apparently seem necessary to uphold
the status quo of asymmetry between fermions as
dictated by Pauli’s “exclusion principle.”
The philosophical question here is: if a simultaneous
measurement is not even possible how are we to
justify the stipulation that there exists a “correlation”
between position and momentum of any individual
particle in the first place or other than purely as a
matter of statistics covering objects in large numbers?
Albert Einstein was not the only one to look with
misgivings on what he perceived as metaphysical
nonsense whenever the physicists in Copenhagen
under the guidance of Niels Bohr and Werner
Heisenberg tried to make head and tail of the particle
nature of quantum physics. The Austrian Nobel
Laureate Erwin Schrödinger (1887 – 1961) therefore
devoted his entire working life to explain the
movement of electrons in terms of waves. He
demonstrated that these electron-waves don’t even
move. They are stationary. (Except for the hydrogen
atom, atoms don’t look at all like the little solar
systems in Rutherford’s model; when IBM published
an image of their logo written in iron atoms, it looked
more like an arrangement of little mountains,
mountains that resembled a graphic depiction of
Schrödinger’s wave function for the iron atom.) So,
every time you check the position of an electron you
will find it, as expected, in a different place, but that
doesn’t mean it moves in between the checks. It is the
checking that moves the electron, or rather
“collapses” its wave-signature to the position we
observe. On reflection this should make the term
“momentum” a tad problematic.
If this change of position between the measurements
is in fact instant whenever the experimenter does his
measurement, then I don’t see how we can speak of a
“momentum” in the sense of classical physics. It’s
more an act of instant “teleportation” utterly
withdrawn from physical time than a gliding move
through time with all the paraphernalia of velocity
and variable momentum.
But if there is no such momentum then there is no
correlation, only statistical superimpositions of
possible localizations before and between the actual
measurements.
The equation describing this process became known
as Schrödinger’s wave function. “In this article,”
Schrödinger wrote, “I should like to show, for the simplest
case of the (non-relativistic and unperturbed) hydrogen
atom, that the usual rule for quantization can be replaced
by another requirement in which there is no longer any
mention of ‘integers.’ The integral property follows, rather,
in the same natural way that, say, the number of nodes of a
vibrating string must be an integer. The new interpretation
can be generalized and, I believe, strikes very deep into the
true nature of quantum mechanics” (E. Schrödinger, Annals of
Physics 1926, 79, 361). Schrödinger concluded that a
subatomic particle such as an electron exists
simultaneously in a number of possible states; the
probability of each is incorporated in Schrödinger’s
wave function.
Common sense would reason that at any given point
in time there are only that many possibilities, either
an atom has decayed, or it has not. Yet quantum
mechanics is telling a different story: the atom is
understood to inhabit both states simultaneously
before it is being observed. And with a view on
Aspect’s experiment this makes perfect sense. The
observational procedure takes on the role, so to speak,
of one of the polarization filters in Aspect’s
experiment. In 1935, however, this was still a wild
guess, and Schrödinger, in an attempt of lampooning
the guys in Copenhagen, published his famous paper
with the “Cat Paradox” as a tongue in cheek dig at
Niels Bohr (1885 – 1962).
“A cat,” Schrödinger wrote, “is penned up in a steel
chamber, along with the following diabolical device (which
must be secured against direct interference by the cat): in a
Geiger counter there is a tiny bit of radioactive substance, so
small, that perhaps in the course of one hour one of the
atoms decays, but also, with equal probability, perhaps
none. If it happens, the counter tube discharges and
through a relay releases a hammer which shatters a small
flask of hydrocyanic acid.”
“If this arrangement is left alone for an hour, one would
say that the cat still lives if no atom has decayed, or
otherwise would be poisoned. However before the box is
opened, the wave-function expresses this by having in it the
living and the dead cat (pardon the expression) mixed or
smeared into equal parts” (Schrödinger).
The little dig at Copenhagen pleased Einstein no end,
he liked the ideas of Schrödinger, as well as the man;
Schrödinger was a likable fellow and quite a bit of a
ladies man, but as in the case of the Rosen-Podolsky
proposition neither Einstein nor Schrödinger had
counted on the possibility that somebody might take
the joke seriously and put it to the test.
A team of physicists – Christopher Monroe, Dawn
Meekhof, Brian King and Dave Wineland – confined a
charged beryllium atom in a tiny electromagnetic cage
and then cooled it with a laser to its lowest energy
state. In this state the position of the atom and its
“spin” (a quantum property that is only
metaphorically analogous to spin in the ordinary
sense) could be ascertained within a very high degree
of accuracy, though limited by Heisenberg’s
uncertainty principle. The next step was to stimulate
the atom with a laser just enough to change its wave
function. According to the new wave function of the
atom, it now had a fifty percent probability of being in
a “spin-up” state in its initial position and an equal
probability of being in a “spin-down” state in a
position as much as eighty nanometers away, which is
a vast distance in the atomic realm. And lo and behold,
the atom was indeed in two different places at the
same time as well as in two different spin states. The
piece of clinching evidence was the observation of an
interference pattern between the two quantum states.
It is a telltale sign that the single beryllium atom had
produced two distinct wave functions, which now
interfered with each other, the signature of which one
could call the quantum simile of Schrödinger’s
Cheshire cat.
By now there are two schools of thinking to explain
the situation, the proponents of the so-called
“Copenhagen Interpretation” and the followers of
Hugh Everett (among which we find Professor Stephen
Hawking). When a Copenhagenist opens the box in
which the cat is confined, he will find a cat that is
either dead or alive but will claim that this is the
result of opening the box (sic!) and that before, when
nobody was looking, the cat was neither alive nor
dead, just a fuzzy, furry cloud of probabilities which
“collapsed” to the outcome we observe when we lift
the lid. It looks as if we are back to Bishop Berkeley
(1685 – 1753) and the idea that trees only fall when
somebody is looking, which would be a
misunderstanding I used to share. But to use the
analogy, it is still the feller’s ax that is bringing down
the tree, we make it happen and do not merely stare
passively at an incidental fall.
Even so, Dr Hugh Everett III (1930 – 1982) didn’t like the
looks of this. He treated the process of observation
and measurement entirely in terms of Schrödinger’s
wave-mechanics. So when he opens the box, he will
find, just like his colleague from Copenhagen, a cat
either dead or alive. However he will maintain that the
act of opening the box has no effect on the outcome
because Schrödinger’s equation gives a
“superposition” of all possible outcomes and these do
exist all the time according to Everett’s own
reformulation of quantum theory, published in 1957.
It is called “many-worlds.” By opening the box at our
end of a forking path in two separate timelines or
“worlds,” each as real and possible as the opposite, we
actualize what had been lurking there as one of the
two possibilities all along. The cat has split in two, one
dead, one alive. But the cat is not the only one
affected. Box and observer have doubled as well
together with the whole set of accompanying
circumstances that have seen the observer to confine a
cat for one agonizing hour in the quantum limbo of
Schrödinger’s box. The world continues into two
different directions simultaneously. But where is the
other cat? Where is the other observer? Where is the
other me who has decided not to write this essay?
When should we begin to speak of a quantum event?
From the moment when we confine the cat in the box
and close the lid or later when we open the box? In
Copenhagen they would insist that it is the opening,
and only the opening. What happens before is hidden
in the murk of quantum limbo and not only
withdrawn from observation but virtually from
existence. In his cat analogy Schrödinger allowed for
one hour of waiting time before we open the lid, which
is one hour for the observer in his own world, but
what about the time in the box? Is there such a thing
as time in quantum limbo or is it all suspended?
According to Everett the question doesn’t make
sense, even if we put it all on the moment of opening
the box. Unobservable from our direction in time the
split is a fully present superposition on its own
branch, although for some unexplained reason the
opposite outcome “decohers” from our observation
and remains invisible to the observer and his
doppelganger on the opposite end. And this might be
relevant not only for a prospective time traveler, but
also explain why time travel doesn’t create any
unexplained paradoxes.
Everett went by the assumption that Schrödinger’s
wave-function is a real physical object, as real as my
house key, and therefore observations or
measurements based on it apply at any time for every
observer anywhere; in the case of Schrödinger’s cat,
before as well as after opening the box. This is the
central assumption of “many-worlds.”
Everett’s proposal has obvious cosmological
advantages. It is the only game in town that is
unequivocal in embracing infinity, the real thing, not
Professor Hawking’s uninterrupted running of the
hamster in his wheel. We remember: when Professor
Hawking is saying that spacetime has no boundary he
doesn’t mean to say the Universe is infinite; but Georg
Cantor (1845 – 1918) has made us understand that infinite
sets possess an actual, albeit infinite number of
members and that various infinite sets can vary in
size. Any section out of an infinite set – for instance
the prime numbers – has as many members as the
collection as a whole. Infinite sets are as complete as
any set of finite integers and yet as “countable” as is
every set that can be put in a one to one
correspondence with other sets of integers.
In other words, “infinity” is not an ever-growing
progression. It is an immediate presence.
Among the cosmologists of the past – Epicurus,
Lucretius, Bruno, Newton – Sir Isaac (1642 – 1727) was the
first real scientist taking the notion of infinity
seriously.
In his private notes Newton had anticipated much of
Albert Einstein: “Are not gross Bodies and Light
convertible into one another, and may not Bodies receive
much of the Activity from the Particles of Light which enter
the Composition?” I don’t know about you, but this is
hitting pretty close to Einstein’s E=mv2 (energy equals mass
by the square power of light velocity) . Sir Isaac even
speculated, that “another force, independent of gravity,
magnetism, and electricity, might prevail only at the
smallest distances;” a truly eerie insight for a man from
a century wading up to the ankles in horse manure. In
his publications however, Sir Isaac banked his
reputation on Kepler's three laws of planetary motion.
Newton’s resulting law of gravity suggested to him a
world ultimately destined to collapse. So to prevent
this from happening, Newton’s celestial mechanics
require a homogeneous Universe stretching into
infinity – the real thing. Professor Hawking in his book
has brushed this aside, claiming, that even so all
matter would ultimately coalesce and collapse into
one dense mass. An example for Homer caught
napping. After all, it was Professor Hawking himself,
who had proven that even black holes eventually must
evaporate, in other words, have a limited lifespan –
which in an Universe of infinite extension means that
some celestial bodies may not make the distance
towards the crunch point.
The imperial astrologer Johannes Kepler thought he
had a better argument against infinity; it became later
known as “Olber’s Paradox.” In 1610 Kepler published
his Conversations with the Starry Messenger. “In an infinite
Universe,” Kepler argued, “every line of vision must end
on the surface of a star, would this not make the whole
celestial vault as luminous as the Sun?”
Kepler was as bright as Newton or Professor
Hawking, and yet he missed it. Still writing by
candlelight, it should have occurred to him that
candles – or stars – even in infinite numbers do not
burn all the time. In 1676 Ole Roemer (1644 – 1710)
calculated a good approximation for the speed of light,
and in 1901 Lord Kelvin (1824 – 1907) made the crucial
step of expressing distances to stars in terms of their
light signature’s travel time. In his paper On Ether and
Gravitational Matter through Infinite Space, Lord Kelvin
picked up on a suggestion by the poet Edgar Allen Poe,
and pointed out that a star’s lifetime is limited by its
available energy resources. As we look out into space,
we also look back in time, to the darkness that existed
before the birth of a luminous body and to the
darkness that followed its expiration. Modern
estimates of the distance of luminous bodies in the
cosmic background give a value of 1023 light years,
meaning that in order to see a star’s emissions on
every line of sight, such star must have been shining
for at least 10 to the power of 23 years. But the lifetime
of a sun-like star is only 1010 years. In other words the
answer to the question where all the starlight has
gone is, that it hasn't reached us yet, and some never
will before our own solar system expires. Of all
possible explanations why and how in an infinite
Universe the sky is dark at night – there are several I
am aware of – this is the one with the fewest
theoretical assumptions. Therefore “there is no rational
reason to doubt that the universe has existed for an infinite
time. Only myths attempt to say how the universe came
about, either 4,000 or twenty billion years ago,” says
Hannes Alfven.
It is a world where the number of transcendental
numbers – values such as pi and e – is very much
larger than the total of integers and the values of rare
constants stand out from the chaos of random
numbers like the nodes marking the intervals on a
musical string instrument.
Everett’s idea is also the only scientific explanation
that makes the appearance of mind and intelligence
inevitable without gambling against the odds or
requiring the input of an intelligent designer or
seeking assistance from the convenience of some or
other “anthropic principle.” Usually we have to
content ourselves with the notion that our existence is
a possible outcome of evolution but not a necessity. In
Everett’s Universe it is inevitable because every
quantum event generates the whole gamut of possible
outcomes. What can happen must happen.
So timelines branch out and there emerge two or
more worlds where formerly had been only one, all of
them sharing the same history before the moment of
separation. For us in our own world all but one branch
of our past are removed from recorded history. Fossils
and the archives of the Vatican testify to the past
existence of dinosaurs and of Pope Innocent III, yet we
also sit on a timeline that has branched out from an
even more distant fork where Innocent and the
Dinosaur’s had been in the cards only as one of several
possibilities. In other words there are observational
horizons on both ends of a single timeline, which
prohibit the direct observation of splitting.
But who knows? Maybe the universal wave-function
is just a symbolic formalism for a totality of all the
“possible” worlds when in the end there is only one
“actual” world. Plotinus (204 – 270 AD) once casually
pointed out that the Universe couldn’t be symbol and
reality at the same time.
Everett’s theory, however, does not address any issue
of the “possible” and the “actual.” There seems to be
no such distinction necessary for the theory to reflect
our experience. So from a theoretical viewpoint all
elements of a superposition (all “branches”) are
“actual” and none are any more or less “real” than the
rest, which implies a constantly expanding universe,
an expansion we seem to be observing out there.
In the end a debate over the viability of “many-
worlds” as a postulate of physics will be settled by
observations of predicted phenomena. “Many-worlds”
makes a very definite prediction. Gravity must come in
quantized waves rather than exist as the classical
background field of general relativity. Yet so far no
gravity waves have been detected. Neither has anyone
yet observed the existence of gravitons. But in a
Universe of classic gravity stars would bind not only to
the observed galaxies but also to the host of
unobserved parallel worlds.
Henry Cavendish, in 1798 (sic!), measured the torque
produced by the gravitational force on two separated
lead spheres suspended from a torsion fiber to
determine the value of Newton's gravitational
constant. Had the suspended lead spheres been
gravitationally influenced by their parallel doublets in
the parallel laboratories of parallel Henry Cavendishs,
then the torsion would have been the averaged sum of
all these contributions, which, the textbooks say, was
not observed. “In retrospect Cavendish established that
“other-worlds” are not detectable long before Everett even
thought of it.” Maybe. But how could he? In the 18th
century nobody knew or speculated about parallel
worlds; so the values of the gravitational constant may
actually be a reflection of many world influences
without Cavendish or us even suspecting it.
So far quantum physics has opened a glimpse on the
underpinning reality of a world beyond time, which is
not a world in which time can slow down at high
velocities of momentum and even come to a standstill
at the speed of light, but of a world apparently devoid
of any passage of time entirely, what happens,
happens in an instant.
It is still early days but on October 21, 2004,
experiments for the first time have verified frame
dragging as a physical fact of the cosmological
structure out there. A team of NASA and university
researchers found the first direct evidence for the
Earth dragging space and time around itself as it
rotates.
Led by Dr. Ignazio Ciufolini of the University of
Lecce, Italy, and Dr. Erricos C. Pavlis of the Joint
Center for Earth System Technology, the researchers
measured the effect, first predicted in 1918 in
Einstein’s theory of general relativity by observing the
orbits of the Laser Geodynamics Satellite I (LAGEOS I),
a NASA spacecraft, and LAGEOS II, a joint NASA/Italian
Space Agency (ASI) spacecraft.
“General relativity predicts massive rotating objects
should drag space-time around themselves as they rotate,”
Pavlis said. “Frame dragging is like what happens if a
bowling ball spins in a thick fluid such as molasses. As the
ball spins, it pulls the molasses around itself. Anything stuck
in the molasses will also move around the ball. Similarly, as
the Earth rotates, it pulls space-time in its vicinity around
itself. This will shift the orbits of satellites near Earth.”
“We found the plane of the orbits of LAGEOS I and II were
shifted about six feet (two meters) per year in the direction
of the Earth’s rotation,” Pavlis said. “Our measurement
agrees 99 percent with what is predicted by general
relativity, which is within our margin of error of plus or
minus five percent. Even if the gravitational model errors
are off by two or three times the officially quoted values, our
measurement is still accurate to 10 percent or better.”
This can only be grist on the mills of Ronald
Lawrence “Ron” Mallett (*1945), an American
theoretical physicist, academic, and author. He
teaches physics at the University of Connecticut since
1975 and is best known for his scientific position on
the possibility of time travel.
Mallett was born in Roaring Spring, Pennsylvania,
and grew up in The Bronx in New York City. When he
was ten years old, his father died at age 33 of a heart
attack. About one year later, at age 11, Mallett found a
Classics Illustrated comic book version of H.G. Wells’
The Time Machine. Inspired by this literature, he
resolved to travel back in time to save his father. This
idea became a lifelong obsession and the basis of his
research into time travel.
In 1973, when he was twenty-eight years old, Mallett
received a Ph.D. from Penn State University. Also that
year, he received the Graduate Assistant Award for
Excellence in Teaching. In 1975, Mallett was appointed
a job as Assistant Professor at the University of
Connecticut, where he continues to work today. His
research interests include general relativity and
quantum gravity. Mallett was promoted to Associate
Professor and Professor in 1987.
For quite some time he has been working on plans
for a time machine. This technology would be based
upon a ring laser’s properties within the context of
Einstein’s Theory of Relativity. Mallett argues that the
ring laser would produce a limited amount of frame-
dragging which might be measured experimentally:
“In Einstein's General Theory of Relativity, both matter and
energy can create a gravitational field. This means that the
energy of a light beam can produce a gravitational field. My
current research considers both the weak and strong
gravitational fields produced by a single continuously
circulating unidirectional beam of light. In the weak
gravitational field of an unidirectional ring laser, it is
predicted that a spinning neutral particle, when placed in
the ring, is dragged around by the resulting gravitational
field.”
In a later paper, Mallett argues that at sufficient
energies, the circulating laser might produce not just
frame-dragging but also closed timelike curves (CTC),
allowing time travel into the past: “For the strong
gravitational field of a circulating cylinder of light, I have
found new exact solutions of the Einstein field equations for
the exterior and interior gravitational fields of the light
cylinder. The exterior gravitational field is shown to contain
closed timelike lines.
The presence of closed timelike lines indicates the
possibility of time travel into the past. This creates the
foundation for a time machine based on a circulating
cylinder of light.”
Mallett also wrote a book entitled, “Time Traveler: A
Scientist's Personal Mission to Make Time Travel a Reality.”
It is a good and honest book (the science is for real),
but from where I am sitting I feel the technology for a
portable time machine is still a long way off. For now
it will remain to be a costly thing to bring the
chrononaut up into space to exploit the frame
dragging effects either of Earth or perhaps even
Jupiter, or on the odd occasion even of the mutual
alignment between several planets in the solar system.
(I hope my feeling is one of those predictions like the
principal rejection of heavier than air flying machines
made by the pundits when the Orville brothers were
already air born. After all, who wouldn’t want simply
pull the time machine out of the garage and don
helmet and camouflage for a holiday in the Jurassic?)