Practical Time Travel - Entangling the Near Future with the Recent Past
Allan Goff
This paper surveys a research effort to explore the potential for quantum nonlocality to support superluminal signaling. The emphasis is on the issue of temporal paradox. Through the metaphor of Quantum Tic-Tac-Toe, it is shown how superposition leads to a Many Worlds variant called the Classical Ensemble. As a quantum system evolves, superposition branches off new classical realities, but contradictory ones are pruned from the ensemble. The pruning results in nonseparable states and thus to entangling of the quantum system. When these entanglements become cyclic, they introduce nonlinearities into the quantum system that result in self-collapse. Since cyclic entanglements are in general self-referential in only one basis, collapse occurs only in the self-referential basis. Cyclic entanglements are thus a viable candidate as the measurement mechanism. Collapse is made consistent with relativity by introducing the symmetric spacetime interval. The resulting closed loops in spacetime entangle the near future with the recent past so collapse of quantum systems offers a potential means for achieving superluminal signaling (FTL) and something very like time travel. The pruning in the classical ensemble acts as the censor mechanism that prevents temporal paradox while allowing backwards-in-time causality. This removes the logical objections to FTL and time travel.
AIAA/ASME/SAE/ASEE Joint Propulsion Conference & Exhibit (JPC)•Jul 10, 2005•1 citation