...Travelling backwards in time will always remain as a part of Science Fiction, but then again, Travelling forwards is - and probably will be a possibility in the near future - by either cryocenic freezing, or a spaceship which is able to generate enough energy to create a so called worm-hole in space. The key is in Time being relative.



However, let us form a discussion about Time travelling, and the possibilities of it there of.

Time travel could be 'one way' to future only....hence the effects will be minimal.

This is how I see it. Time is considered its own dimension, but it isn't spacial. We can't move around in it. But suppose we could? I think there is a way to move around in the time dimension as if it were a normal dimension. We could then move forwards, backwards and even sideways in time. Of course, you wouldn't see yourself moving through it, I don't think you would be able to look in a direction of time and see the events that happened there.

There is no reason why we should never travel forwards in time.

Look at time as d4.
We travel at a 'constant' speed in one direction along it.
If we can manipulate it to allow the speed of travel in this direction to be varied, what would stop us from manipulating it to allow us to go backwards?
There are obvious causality considerations which must be accounted for, but the actuality of it should be no more difficu than generating accelerated forwards motion along it's axis.

My thoughts.

Esp, if we would truly find a way to travel backwards in time, it would debunk all religions. Secondly, we could only watch the events - and not manipulate them; for our actions might change future greatly... and as what has happened, has indeed already happened, we can not change it - if we are not talking about another dimension.



If there are billions of parallel universes stacked upon each other, we could take it as a theory that time-travelling COULD be possible... but if we have only this universe - only these dimensions we are aware of, then, no way.

This may be a complex theory, but my idea of time travel states that for every frame of time (picosecond I guess) another dimension is created, and we are moving through one at every frame. So, if we wanted to go back in time we would have to open a portal to a dimension to our dimensions side, and we could do whatever we wanted there because that dimension would be wholly different from our own, it would be separate. The same thing goes for traveling forward.

Originally posted by Extra Terrestrial Lifeform
...Travelling backwards in time will always remain as a part of Science Fiction, but then again, Travelling forwards is - and probably will be a possibility in the near future - by either cryocenic freezing, or a spaceship which is able to generate enough energy to create a so called worm-hole in space. The key is in Time being relative.



However, let us form a discussion about Time travelling, and the possibilities of it there of.


Time travel is impossible.,Whether to the future or the past. This is because:

1.The past is over. Theoretically everything you know, knew, or ever will know is the past
2. The future is like a huge program. Everything happens on what you did in the past and nothing is a set control. If you do something, one of infinite reactions will happen.


Time is not an element. Nor a dimension. I even regret calling it an idea, because "Time" or the "Future" depends on the present which is the past. And technically the future is the past. Time is a paradox for fools and dreamers

Thirty Seven, Time Travelling forward is possible - if you find a way to travel multiple times faster than light. Time will flow differently to you - and one day to you might be 80 years to the people living on earth. So, IMO, it is a possibility.

I have yet to be convinced that the whole time-dilation thing works as many people claim (without proof, I might add). Either way, I doubt we will know the anser here until we can actually perform the task (fly a ship that fast).

If you fly a ship that fast you'd only freeze time the moment you reached light speed or close to it while everyone else moved forward. From their point of view you wouldn't have moved, however from yours once you stopped moving at lightspeed everything around you would've skipped, the friends on the radio would be done with conversations that had begun seconds before, that sort of thing. I think I'm correct but I'm not sure.

All in all, you pitch the universe forward in time while you remain in the same place.

Originally posted by Extra Terrestrial Lifeform
Thirty Seven, Time Travelling forward is possible - if you find a way to travel multiple times faster than light. Time will flow differently to you - and one day to you might be 80 years to the people living on earth. So, IMO, it is a possibility.

I'm still not convinced. Even if you can achieve traveling faster than light, it wont take you to the future, the future hasnt hapened yet.

I think that whole idea about going faster than light and heading into the future faster than you should is basically a misinterpretation of the facts. If you go faster than light away from Earth, you will overtake/pass through the light travelling away from Earth so that you could, if you looked back toward Earth, see its state in about 1950 or whatever. This does not in any way indicate time travel. All it means is that you are travelling faster than a signal/emission. As you travel back toward Earth, the relative frequency of the emissions/signals will increase due to you heading into them. Again, this does not indicate time travel.

Originally posted by Adam
I think that whole idea about going faster than light and heading into the future faster than you should is basically a misinterpretation of the facts. If you go faster than light away from Earth, you will overtake/pass through the light travelling away from Earth so that you could, if you looked back toward Earth, see its state in about 1950 or whatever. This does not in any way indicate time travel. All it means is that you are travelling faster than a signal/emission. As you travel back toward Earth, the relative frequency of the emissions/signals will increase due to you heading into them. Again, this does not indicate time travel.

I've heard that as well, good point

i think the theory of time travel is unrealistic in the way we all look at it. Time is not relative as a whole butrelative to each person. time is man made definition. you cant graph time. if you try to it makes no sence. it like trying to see it like this
(numbers = some measurement of time)
1(now)------2(fut.)------3(fut.)------4(fut.)------5(fut.)------6(fut.)

1(past)------2(now)------3(fut.)------4(fut.)------5(fut.)------6(fut.)

1(past)------2(past)------3(now)------4(fut.)------5(fut.)------6(fut.)

you cant define a point in time as being present past or future. its like trying to say that one point is more "here" than another point is "here".

i think if theres any way to time travel its through alternate dimensions

Good points. Perhaps future and past as dimensions of time are unexistant, and the only existing form of time is present. With every second, we redefine ourselves. We will always be in the present.



Then again, what I displayed as theory is rather science fiction than based upon any facts. I wasn't speaking about travelling into the future, however - I was just referring it to the relativity of time - if it exists.

Can a two dimensional being (though none exist as we know it) move through the third dimension?
I think if we figured this out, it would answer our question on time travel. That is, whether it's possible or not.

Time travel is possible and has occured and is always occuring. Russian Cosmonaut Sergei Adeyev (The one who spent 2 years in MIR) is the first major time travelor. Being on MIR going at the fantastic speed he travelled 1/50 of a second into the future. The faster an object is moving, the faster into the future it is going. This has been going on all along. A clock in motion ticks slower than a clock than a stationary clock; a moving clock travels into the future relative to the clock at rest. We only now have tools accurate enough to detect it. This is all proven, look it up if you do not believe me.

Practically (Now), the closer you get to the speed of light the farther into the future you go. If you go the speed of light, theoretically time stops. Then theoretically if you surpass the speed of light you go into the past.

As of now we only know travel into the future is possible, in time we may know more. I hope i have been of help

Isn't it that when you travel faster time moves slower?

http://home.a-city.de/walter.fendt/physengl/timedil1.htm

Pollux, time moves slower when you are going fast (Below light speed). If you fly in a ship for 5 minutes (Close to light speed), but time progresses on earth for 1 hour, you have went to the future, have you not?



You have aged 5 minutes while everone has aged 1 hour. You literally went to the future.

Aha! Forgive me, the theory of relativity is a complex one to master. Whole hours of thought could be devoted to such a complex concept...

Whole years, Pollux. A lifetime.

The best argument that I've heard about the impossibility of time travel was from a physicist (Hawking, I believe, but I could be wrong), who stated (paraphrased from memory) "If time travel were possible, where are all the time travelers." His point is obvious.

Time Travel (http://freespace.virgin.net/steve.preston/time1.html)

Every time anything moves, the moving object travels into the future. Time for that object slows down (a little)...

Also, HAHAHA GREAT argument paulsamuel ;) hahaha :)

PS. Gonna go for a jog. When i come back, my watch will be slightly behind the one on my wall (if they were exactly the same that is).

Question... do people that live near the equator live longer cuz they are moving more relative to the rest of us? or is this small speed insignificant?

Super luminal speed is possible; you just cease to exist in this reality branching into a different reality. The quantum power of the mind is the fastest thing around.


light shmite.

Originally posted by Adam
I have yet to be convinced that the whole time-dilation thing works as many people claim (without proof, I might add). Either way, I doubt we will know the anser here until we can actually perform the task (fly a ship that fast).

Time dilation has been proven. The simplest experiment involved taking two atomic clock and sychronizing them.
One was then left on the ground while the other was flown at high speeds.
After landing, the clock that was taken on the plane showed that less time had passed than for the clock on the ground.

There are some other evidences as well.

http://www.plu.edu/~danielmj/Evidence.htm

~Raithere

I believe in the idea that a new dimension/universe is created at intervals of time, but i think the length of this time would probably be equal to the amount of time it takes for the smallest particle(higgs particle or strings or whatever it is) to cover it's own length at the speed of light.

This kinda makes sense cause whatever the smallest particle is, nothing should be able to move in smaller distances than that. And since the speed of light is basically the speed limit for everything, so, the smallest distance + the fastest speed = shortest time. That time would be the smallest unit of time there is for everything.

and that number would be TINY, that means alot of universes for time travel

Raithere

When I get some free time here at uni, I intend to investigate all such proofs and look for holes in them. I'm sure many other people with more education in these things have done so before me, but I'd like to do it anyway.

Adam, stop being so ignorant. Everywhere you are posting about how you don't beleave in more than three dimensions. Perhaps you should do some investigation and learn about physics before you post such claims. Do you think that Einstein and all modern physicists are wrong? Perhaps its all a conspiracy so they can keep their jobs? Perhaps you think the world is flat.

Being skeptical is good to a certain extent, but not when it borders on ignorance.

paulsamuel,

Yes, that is a good argument against time travel. Allthough there are concievable ways around it. And you were right, it was Stephen Hawking who said it.

Here's a link to one of his lectures:

http://www.hawking.org.uk/lectures/warps.html

Thoughts on time,

Can there be a zero point slice of time? A frozen instance that we call consciousness speeding along at the speed of light through space. Why not, It's an easy way to just sum it up and move along. These are not the droids your looking for! I think the smallest and largest details of the universe will be forever infinitely unknowable.

Computers will one day reverse engineer every piece of DNA on earth. Maybe soon, maybe later, but it's going to happen. I see a future where powerful super computers, quantum super crunching network monsters, that will more than likely have the power to suck up our reality as we know it and generate whatever reality we wish. Time travel if you want to... whatever!

Did you know that rice has 10 thousand more genes than humans? humbling.

Excuse my rambling...

Pine_net

It is a good thought. I think, any mechanism one uses to travel back in time will automatically generate a separate time line that will have two separate realities running side by side in parallel. Think about it....

Also, there is nothing in physics that prevents a time line to come to a dead stop. You can have a time bubble too....

Ive read about two theories that allow time travel to the past.

1) You create a wormhole than move one end of it so time will dialate on that side. When you go through the end that was stationary you will come out on the other side earlier than you entered the wormhole because of the time dialation.

2) You get a rapidly spinning high mass object (like a pulsar) it will bend spacetime around it. If it bends it enough theoreticly it can allow travel back in time

Wormholes would be the only way of travelling faster than light.... Well, if you went through a wormhole you wouldn't be travel all that fast, you could probably just fly into it at a normal aircraft speed and appear at it's end instaneously.

Of course this would mean that the universe suffers from it's own form of Alzheimers, where one end of the wormhole would supposedly be in future time in comparison to the other. Although both ends exist at the same level throughout spacetime.

You have to remember that spacetime refers to timing of light ans energy in our universe, if you were to deprive the universe of quanta and make a space a pure void then time would supposely not exist.

As for people talking about travelling at light speed, Try thinking of it like this. from an observer point of view you would be nothing more than light, or an x-ray. This would allow you the chance to penetrate objects (travel through them) But as you travel some of your photons would be absorbed by other mass.

So the further you travel you would have less physical constituancy until you got to the point where you would no longer exist. (or if you tried to re-appear your quantum entanglement would be too unstable and you'd probably die)

I would say the only thing you have to worry about if you travelled through a wormhole would be going too close ot it's walls, since it's walls would comprise of miniture time dialations, that could cause an quantum entangled alzheimer experience should you try appearing in normal space. (you'd appear at multiple times, in multiple places.... And not all together)

Suppose you can travel from New York to Tokyo at light speed. If you start at 10:00 AM from New York and you are 25 years old, what time you will reach Tokyo (NY time)? and at what age?

Lets see, For this one to work Kmguru, you would have to allow the lightspeed travel to only travel (no slowing down or speeding up, or landing) and it would have to follow air paths similar to that of Air Japan.

New York To Tokyo (by Air) 6749 miles (10861 Km) Unless your Phileas Fogg and feel like Circumnavigation, which I can't help you with.

The speed you want to travel is light speed, but this the standard calcuation, not one that differs due to spectrum positioning.

lightspeed = 299'792'458 m/s (metres per second).

Next the fiddley calcs...

1/(Lightspeed m/Distance m) that gives you the number of "seconds".

(I'm sure budding Physicists will convert it to those lovely letters that all Algebra despisors hate)

The given answer is:
0.036228396379471294104403386959128 secs
Or 3 and a half nanoseconds, for the rounding off.

The time would be 10:00hr and 3.6 nanoseconds in New York time, and 00:00hr and 3.6 nanoseconds in Tokyo.
You would be 25 years old and + that 3.6 nanoseconds.

This is just going by paper mathematics, if you were to look at an experiment that was done involving the use of a normal plane and a time piece, the actual answer was they lost seconds, but I think you will find that will be down to Magnetic changes due to landplates and wether the two locations are near to a particular pole.

Thoughts-
Time travel to the future is possible by time dilation as demonstrated by the synchronised atomic clocks, one stationary relative to the other travelling at great speeds. Time travel to the future is therefore possible. However, time travel to the past is virtually impossible without using theoretical and exotic structures such as wormholes (and even this i doubt as explained later on). Time travel to the past by time dilation is only possible at superluminal speeds. The faster you travel from a stand still towards the speed of light, the more you will travel into the future relative to the people on earth where you started your journey. Theoretically, if you are at the speed of light, then your time freezes. And if your speed exceeds that of light (superluminal speeds), then time as experienced by you, will reverse. But we all know that according to Einstein, superluminal speeds are impossible because nothing can travel at the speed of light except light itself, let alone faster than it. This law preserves the past in its state and prevents paradoxes such as the grandfather paradox (where, if you travel back in time and kill your grandfather, what will happen to you??). And i also believe that wormholes cannot exist because the nature of the "exotic matter" needed to construct one is not known. Also, if such an object exists, we would not be able to travel backwards in time because the paradoxes that will be encountered will not permit such an action. The end result will most likely be the annihilation of the traveler.

In theory quantum physics allows for time travel through wormholes or warping of space-time, however severe constraints are placed on creating such phenomenon. These constraints are probably insurmountable as it would be necessary to come up with unimaginable amounts of negative energy, somewhere on the order of 10 billion times the mass of the observable universe.

See the following link for more info:

http://www.physics.hku.hk/~tboyce/sf/topics/wormhole/wormhole.html

The point made by Stephen Hawking strikes at the heart of the subject. Where are all the time travellers? And don't tell me about any temporal prime directive or other Star Trek handwavium.

What is impossible today could be possible tomorrow. While the speed may be limited to the light speed or just below it (for mass to move), it may be possible if we find out that there are extra dimensions one can navigate through that sci-fi calls it hyperspace or third space (a la Babylon 5).

IMHO, it may be impossible for mass to travel back or forward in time if the whole universe is sliced along the timeline where the sumtotal of energy and matter is constant from one slice to the other. On the otherhand, if one can move the information about the mass and build that mass from available mass/energy at another slice of time - it may be possible to do so. But it gets sticky because if the moon is duplicated (or moved to the future) in the same universe, then you have two moons....

What is impossible today could be possible tomorrow. While the speed may be limited to the light speed or just below it (for mass to move), it may be possible if we find out that there are extra dimensions one can navigate through that sci-fi calls it hyperspace or third space (a la Babylon 5).

IMHO, it may be impossible for mass to travel back or forward in time if the whole universe is sliced along the timeline where the sumtotal of energy and matter is constant from one slice to the other. On the otherhand, if one can move the information about the mass and build that mass from available mass/energy at another slice of time - it may be possible to do so. But it gets sticky because if the moon is duplicated (or moved to the future) in the same universe, then you have two moons....
Wouldn't this violate the law of conservation of mass/energy? (i.e. Matter/energy cannot be made or destroyed, only changes form):confused:

This is one(of the many) aspects of physics I don't understand.
Why can't solid objects travel that fast? Theoretically, isn't there always a "faster"?
Are you saying that if somehow you made a bullet go a million times faster than it does normally you just didn't and you should forget about it?:bugeye:

Hows this, imagine the fastest jet travelling through space, now imagine some astronaught sitting on the nose of that jet with a high-powered rifle, he shoots, now imagine that sitting on the bullet was a little microscopic astronaught with another gun he shoots and so on. The bullets would have to be getting faster and faster regarless of what some equation says. Eventually they would have to reach the speed of light and then they would have to go back in time.

I know there is some non-understandable flaw with this but can someone give it in laymans?:(

The velocity of an object can have any value between 0 and c, not including c. That leaves infinite number of values. If i am travelling at c-1 m/s then I can still accelerate for a million years, I will simply be taking a million years and still not fully accelerate that last 1 m/s.

With the gun example, what the gun is doing is adding kinetic energy to the projectiles. In newtonian physics (far under c) KE = 1/2mv^2. Which means we can see that at some point we can have enough kinetic energy to be at the speed of light. But the equation KE=1/2mv^2 isn't true for relativistic speeds. Check this site..its not bad.

http://hyperphysics.phy-astr.gsu.edu/hbase/relativ/releng.html#c5 (Relativistic Kinetic Energy)

-AntonK

OK, in laymans terms....
The reason why solid objects cannot travel at the speed of light is because these objects have mass. Anything with mass cannot travel at or faster than the speed of light.

Why?? Well, according to Einstein and Newton, whenever something (with mass) travels, it experiences inertia. You have experienced it when you're in your car. You feel yourself press onto the seat as you accelerate. Another example is on planets with more gravity, like on Jupiter. When you stand on jupiter, you weigh alot more than you weigh on earth. Earth's gravitation is 9.8 metres per second, while jupiter's gravity is alot more. This downwards acceleration gives your weight.
In reality, you are not really gaining mass, you are just experiencing forces which act upon you to give you that impression and feeling.
Now, according to Einstein and Newton, the faster you travel, the larger the magnitude of these forces are experienced. So the closer your speed is to the speed of light, the more mass you are gaining. As you can see, there is an infinite amount of numbers between zero velocity and the speed of light. (i.e. from 0% of the speed of light to 0.9999999999.......infinite9999....% of the speed of light). So therefore, the closer you get to the speed of light and gain more mass, the amount of mass you gain becomes infinite. With infinite mass, you can never reach light speed.

The only things that can travel at the speed of light is light itself, and the other waves of the electromagnetic spectrum. These waves have no mass. Although light is refered to as photon particles, it is the only particle that contains no mass. So, zero mass=ability to reach the light speed. Because 0 mass can reach this speed, then a mass greater than 0 would yield speeds less than the speed of light. Also, speeds greater than the speed of light is impossible because to achieve this, you would need a mass below that of 0. This is impossible as you can never have negative mass. :eek: pretty complex stuff, but im sure you will understand that. After all, i do, and im only 17

Thanks:)
That cleared it up really well.
How about this; could light travel faster than light? If you know what I mean.
If we had the technology, could we speed light up? I can think of some possibilities if we could, like being able to see the past but not physically go there.

Breaking the Light Speed Limit


Once thought to be unbreakable, the speed of light as set by the laws of physics has been exceeded in two recent experiments, according to a New York Times news report. The speed of light in a vacuum, or empty space, is 186,000 miles per second. Exceeding this speed jeopardizes the entire theory of relativity, which rests on the idea that light speed is the universal limit to how fast anything can travel.

Scientists have found ways to break that speed limit. In one experiment performed by researchers at the NEC Research Institute in Princeton, N.J., a pulse of light was sent through a transparent chamber filled with specially prepared cesium gas and was pushed to travel at speeds of 300 times the normal speed of light. The light travels so fast that the main part of the light pulse exits the chamber even before it enters. Theoretically, this means that you could see a moment in time before it actually takes place.

Researchers at the NEC declined to comment on the experiment while it is under review by Nature, a weekly peer-reviewed science journal. However, Kazuko Anderson, a spokesperson with the NEC in New York, confirmed the accuracy of the New York Times report.

In a second superluminal study, published in the May 22 issue of Physical Review Letters, scientists at the Italian National Research Council of Florence shone light beams at a curved mirror. The mirror then shot the beams back at the instrument that measured the rays' speeds. The beam coming from the center of the mirror was measured at 5 percent to 7 percent faster than light speed. The authors said this effect only works over relatively short distances, such as the one meter used by the Italian researchers.

Exceeding the speed of light may have future implications for space travel and computer chips, but for now scientists are uncertain about the practical use of this discovery. Neither experiment was able to use a light beam to carry any information or prove that an object of any weight would be able to travel beyond light speed.

I am guessing than somehow photon picks up energy in the medium and hence travels so fast. A little energy goes a long way. May be energy compatibility is the key, since light itself is made of energy (no mass).

Someday we may find exotic matter that can have the properties of both energy and matter. I wonder if we build a ship with such matter, it may go at or faster than the speed of light while internal mass could be suspended in a relative mass (Like Dr. Who - TARDIS)

Who knows....

Actually, they didn't really break the speed of light. Well they did, but not in a vacuum.
The speed of light is fastest possible in a complete vacuum. The cesium gas must have had an effect on the speed of light, just like water does. They slowed the beam of light going through the chamber down and then recorded it relative to the light outside the gas chamber. This explains the seeming superluminous speeds.

It's just like in nuclear reactors. The fission reaactions cause particle decay with beta radiation. This radiation enters the water (water used for cooling) around the reactor. What happens here is that the water slows down the light because water and air are different mediums. At the same time, the beta particles travel at their usual speed through the water. So now, the beta particles relative to the light, is faster. However, the beta particles never exceeds the speed of light ina vacuum.

Heres an example: pretend the speed of light in a vacuum is 1 unit.
Next, the speed of the beta particle is 0.95 units
As you can see, the beta particles travel at a speed close to that of light.
Now, pretend light travels at 0.9999 units in the air above the water (speed is 0.9999 units because air is not vacuum, so speed is slightly slower). When it enters the water, the speed drops down to 0.90 units. As you can see, the light speed in water now is slowed down (0.90 now), and the speed of the beta particle is 0.95 units. When the beta particle enters the water, it slows down to just say, 0.93 units.
At that moment, the speed of the beta particle (0.93 units) is faster than the speed of light (0.90) in the same medium (water), but never faster than the ultimate speed of light which is 1 unit in a perfect vacuum here.

Also, something interesting is cerenkov radiation. When the speed of sound is exceeded, you hear a sonic boom, here, when the speed of light is exceeded, you see an equivalent light emmision called the cerenkov radiation. Check this out:
http://nova.nuc.umr.edu/~ans/cerenkov.html

So, I believe this preserves the relativity theory. Thats because the speed of light is exceeded only because it was slowed down in a denser medium such as water or in that case, cesium gas.

Wow, i wrote another essay! ;) this stuff is interesting so i enjoy discussing it.:)

The Nature of Reality

Wang's experiment is the latest and among the potentially most important evidences that the physical world may not operate according to the presently accepted conventions. In the new world that modern science is beginning to perceive, subatomic particles can apparently exist in two places at the same time-making no distinction between space and time.

The problem, according to Einstein's Special Theory of Relativity, is that nothing can travel faster than the speed of light. Any instantaneous communication implied by the view of quantum physics would be tantamount to breaking the time barrier and would open the door to all kinds of unacceptable paradoxes.

Einstein and his colleagues were convinced that no "reasonable definition" of reality would permit such faster-than-light interconnections to exist. (Their argument is now known as the Einstein-Podolsky-Rosen paradox, or EPR paradox for short.)

Rather than believing that some kind of faster-than-light communication was taking place, Niels Bohr offered another explanation: If subatomic particles do not exist until they are observed, then one could no longer think of them as independent "things."

Thus, Einstein was basing his argument on an error when he viewed twin particles as separate. They were part of an indivisible system, and it was meaningless to think of them otherwise. In time, most physicists sided with Bohr and became content that his interpretation was correct.

The Cosmos as a Hyper- Hologram?

There seems to be evidence accumulating to suggest that our world and everything in it are only ghostly images, projections from a higher level of reality so beyond our own that the real reality is literally beyond both space and time. The main architect of this astonishing idea includes one of the world's most eminent thinkers: University of London physicist David Bohm, a protégé of Einstein's and one of the world's most respected quantum physicists.

Bohm's work in plasma physics in the 1950s was considered a landmark. Earlier at the Lawrence Radiation Laboratory, he noticed that in plasmas (gases composed of high density electrons and positive ions) the particles stopped behaving like individuals and started behaving as if they were part of a larger and interconnected whole. Moving to Princeton University in 1947, there too he continued his work in the behavior of oceans of particles, noting their highly organized overall effects and their behaving as if they knew what each of the untold trillions of individual particles were doing.

Bohm's sense of the importance of interconnectedness, as well as years of dissatisfaction with the inability of standard theories to explain all of the phenomena encountered in quantum physics, left him searching. While at Princeton, Bohm and Einstein developed a supportive relationship and shared their mutual restlessness regarding the strange implications of current quantum theory.

One of the implications of Bohm's view has to do with the nature of location. Bohm's interpretation of quantum physics indicated that at the sub-quantum level location ceased to exist. All points in space become equal to all other points in space, and it was meaningless to speak of anything as being separate from anything else. Physicists call this property "non-locality."

The Bell Inequality

Bohm's ideas left most physicists unpersuaded, but they did stir the interest of a few. One of these was John Stewart Bell, a theoretical physicist at CERN, the center for atomic research at Geneva, Switzerland. Like Bohm, Bell had become discontented with the quantum theory and felt there had to be some alternative.

When Bell encountered Bohm's ideas, he wondered if there was some way of experimentally verifying non-locality. Freed up by a sabbatical in 1964, he developed an elegant mathematical approach which revealed how such a two-particle experiment could be performed - the now famed Bell Inequality.

The only problem was that it required a level of technological precision that was not yet available. To be certain that particles - such as those in the EPR paradox - were not using some normal means of communication, the basic operations of the experiment had to be performed in such an infinitesimally brief instant that there wouldn't be enough time for a ray of light to transit the distance separating the two particles. Light travels at about a foot in a nanosecond (thousand-millionth of a second). This meant that the instruments used in the experiment had to perform all the necessary operations within a few nanoseconds.

As technology improved it was finally possible to actually perform the two-particle experiment outlined by Bell. In 1982, a landmark experiment performed by a research team led by physicist Alain Aspect, Jean Dalibard, and Gérard Roger at the Institute of Theoretical and Applied Optics, in Paris, succeeded.

They produced a series of twin photons by heating calcium atoms with lasers, allowed each photon to travel in opposite directions through 6.5 meters of pipe and pass through special filters that directed them toward one of two possible polarization analyzers.

It took each filter 10 nanoseconds to switch between one analyzer or the other, about 30 nanoseconds less than it took light to travel the entire 13 meters separating each set of photons. In this way Aspect and his colleagues were able to rule out any possibility of the photons communicating by any known physical process.

The experiment was a success. Just as quantum theory predicted, each photon was still able to correlate its angle of polarization with that of its twin. This meant that either Einstein's ban against faster-than-light communications was being violated, or the two photons were non-locally connected.

This experiment demonstrated that the web of subatomic particles which comprise our physical universe-the very fabric of "reality" itself-may possess what appears to be a "holographic" property.2

Is Reality Only Virtual?

One of Bohm's most startling suggestions is that the tangible reality of our everyday lives is really a kind of illusion, like a holographic image.

Underlying it is a deeper order of existence, a vast and more primary level of reality that gives birth to all the objects and appearances of our physical world in much the same way that a piece of holographic film gives birth to a hologram. Bohm calls this deeper level of reality the implicate ("enfolded") order and he refers to our level of existence the explicate (unfolded) order.3

Many physicists remain skeptical of Bohm's ideas, but among those who are sympathetic, however, are Roger Penrose of Oxford, the creator of the modern theory of black holes; Bernard d'Espagnat of the University of Paris, one of the leading authorities on the conceptual foundations of quantum theory, and Cambridge's Brian Josephson, winner of the 1973 Nobel Prize in physics. Josephson believes that Bohm's implicate order may someday even lead to the inclusion of God within the framework of science, a view which Josephson supports.4

The holographic paradigm is still a developing concept and riddled with controversies. For decades science has chosen to ignore evidences that do not fit the standard theories. However, the volume of evidence has now reached the point that denial is no longer a viable option.

(The recent entertaining movie, The Thirteenth Floor, explores a "simulation within a simulation," with a plot involving virtual people inhabiting a virtual world with the participants transferring between levels.)

These notions are not very distant from the Biblical presentation of the physical world as being subordinate to the superior reality of the spiritual world.5

The Bible, incidentally, is also unique among all religious books in that it also presents a universe of more than three dimensions, 6 reveals a Creator that is transcendent over His creation,7 and who entered time and space to create the ultimate paradox by fulfilling our future!

The twin photon thing sounds like quantum entanglement. I read about how they teleported a laser beam recently based on this principal.