Paul Davies 'About Time'

[Gardez]

Has anyone read Paul Davies book:
'About Time' Einstein's Unfinished Revolution?

In it on p.205-206

He mentions Fenyman's idea that positrons are electrons traveling backwards in time. Its too bad that I disagree.
If that were true, you should witness the positron BEFORE the collision - w/effect pre-ceeding cause.

Its too bad indeed.. making an chamber of t-reversed electrons seems on the face of it rather easy... combine this with a very simple time based Morse code and you'd have the temporal telephone...
or @least a temporal telegraph.

With some R&D audio and video feeds from tomorrow would be a snap.

[Gardez]

I purchased 'About Time' through:

www.Amazon.com

for a few dollars and its quite an interesting read.....

Einstein said that if quantum mechanics is right, then the world is crazy.
Well, Einstein was right. The world is crazy. Daniel Greenberger

We need not voyage down into the quantum world to get a view of this craziness.
Just figure out which way is north from your present location and look at any stationary object in that direction.
Since the Earth is a 'sphere' and rotates approximately at 1,000 mph , any object north of you is traveling faster than you are traveling.

'Just look at that tree go!'

And the quantum world is a much stranger world than this!

Heres one of Davies thought experiments:

'Imagine switching on a flashlight momentarily, and sending a pulse of light off into space. The light will recede from you at 300,000 kilometers per second.
Now jump into a rocket ship and zoom after it. Suppose the rocket achieves a speed of 200,000 kilometers per second relative to earth.
-end quote-
------------------
According to Davies, which one of these is the correct answer?

1) The pulse of light is receding from you at 100,000 kilometers per second.
2) The pulse of light is receding from you at 200,000 kilometers per second.
3) The pulse of light is receding from you at 300,000 kilometers per second.
--------------------------
His answer:

P.D. says: (p52) :'the pulse recedes at 300,000 kilometers per second both when you are standing on Earth and when you are zooming after the pulse at 200,000 kilometers per second.'

-end quote-

[Gardez]

Anyone who has ever researched tt has probably come across Kip Thorne's (CalTech) 'wormhole', a theoretical connection between distances in space which connect these vast distances in our own universe and possibly between two distinct universes.
Making it possible, through this 'short cut', to get from point A to point B without having to travel the distance separating these two points.
K.T. invented this concept for Carl Sagan to use in his movie 'Contact'.
The 'key' which allows travel through a wm, and to keeping a wormhole open, is 'anti-matter', without it, the opening would collapse the instant anything tried to traverse it.
Now, back to 'AT':
Paul Davies says:
1 That pressure can be negative, implying anti-gravity. (pps. 247-248)
-and that 'pressure' is a source of gravitation.
Thus can negative pressure be thought of as anti-gravity itself....?
Might 'anti-gravity' be used to stabilize K.T.'s wormhole as a re-placement for anti-matter?
And would negative-pressure qualify?
The question becomes this, how would one create negative pressure?
P.D. may have given the answer on p.180:
'No energy means the quantum clock ceases to tick: time bafflingly drops out of the physical description altogether'.
Could a zone of 'no energy' also be considered as a zone of negative pressure?
As well as a zone without 'time' itself?
Onto page 136:
/\
'Most forces decrease in strength with distance, but the /\ force actually gets stronger'.
Einstein called '/\' 'the cosmological term'.
P.D. goes on to say:
'The Cosmological Term is optional in the sense that it can be removed simply by setting /\ equal to zero, thereby recovering the original field equations. But if /\ is chosen to be a positive number , the force it describes is repulsive, as Einstein desired.'
Since the /\ (Einstein's greatest blunder or triumph?) can be considered as 'anti-gravity', might it not better be described as -G rather than as /\ ?..but, I digress...
Back to K.T.'s wormholes for a moment...
page 251
'..if an ancient alien civilization were to make us a gift of an old time machine, or if nature had spontaneously created the necessary wormhole in the remote past, could we visit epochs before our own'.

I have often wondered if wormholes to the past may not have been created in the big bang itself, and if we could find them, if we might not be able to travel back to the beginning of time itself, and possibly to any point along the entire worldline of our universe....?

Now my question is this, is it possible to open a Kip Thorne's (CalTech) 'wormhole',by using Einstein's /\, as described by P.D. ,simply by creating a zone of negative-pressure, wherever this zone is created?

'Muhammad, a mountain was just here looking for you'.

[Gardez]

page 177

'photons and a beam-splitter'....

-quote-

...if both photon paths are the same the photons will arrive at the beam-splitter simultaneously and, for reasons of quantum interference, go to the same detector. The optical arrangement in effect provides a racetrack to compare the travel times of the two photons.
Now suppose a barrier is inserted in one of the paths. Because the photon on that route has to tunnel through the barrier, it may not arrive at the meeting point at the same time as its twin, in which case the delicate interference arrangements are upset, and there is a chance that one photon will go to each detector. However, by adjusting the length of the other route (the one that the twin took) to compensate, you can restore the situation and arrange for simultaneous arrival,and infallible cooperation in detector choice, once more.
If the photon is slightly delayed by going through the barrier, then the twin's path will need to be slightly lenghtened to compensate. By measuring the extra length, you can work out how long the photon took to tunnel.
When the experiment was actually performed, the results were amazing.
With the barrier inserted, the photon that tunneled arrived first!
In other words, the barrier seemed to speed the photon up.
But the photon was already traveling at the speed of light, so on the face of it the photon that tunneled did so faster than light!
The Berkeley group inferred a boost to the photon's velocity of some 70 percent-i.e., the photon tunneled at over five hundered thousand kilometers per second.
-end quote-
-----------------
After all of that, I'm wondering if this tunnel test actually proves that FTL does NOT equate to 'traveling backwards in time'?
In other words, once the photon was traveling at FTL speeds it should have gone backwards in time from that point, this at the same instant it was 'racing' the other photon.
IF that were the case, the other photon should have WON the race.
But it did not, it was the tunneling photon which won the race.
This means that FTL travel will make the 'traveler' either:
1) forward in time
2) has no effect on its time
3) that the photon never traveled at FTL speed
Comments?

-T

[Gardez]

About Time, questions, thoughts, comments, gedankens, and just thinking out loud...

Davies asks the question:

'Do clocks really run slower in the basement?'
(I @ssume 'his basement' is underground)

Then he goes on to say:

'Not only does time really run faster at higher altitudes, it does so at just the rate that Einstein always said it would'.

But he never really answers his own question, he hints that the answer is 'yes'.....?

I'm still looking for additional data.

Is it true that the Earth's gravity field is strongest at its surface?

How does or does 'sea level' affect this?

Since stronger gravity fields slow time; zero gravity fields, such as in space, must have 'faster running time'.

*Is it possible to have a zero gravity field which actually slows time?

I have read that the Earth's core is zero gravity, since you have equal m@ss on all sides....in this zero gravity field would time actually run slower?!