Researching an Idea
- From: "MackTuesday" <mailbjl@xxxxxxxxx>
- Date: 15 Sep 2005 11:26:25 -0700
Some of those people in sci.physics are mean. Maybe the people here
will be nicer...
This is a kind of cross-time communication idea. It's fairly original
but needs refinement. It's based on the notion that in virtual
particle pair production, the antimatter particle can be thought of as
moving backward in time, loosely speaking. What if this is true in the
strictest sense? Furthermore, what if the antimatter particle is
actually the one and the same particle as its matter counterpart? In
other words, what if this pair is actually a causal loop? (Please
forgive me if I'm butchering known physics here!)
Let's take it even further and imagine that more complex causal loops
exist, although less commonly. My story idea has a scientist
attempting to "amplify" these naturally occuring causal loops in order
to bootstrap the creation of a "temporal transceiver" (I know, cheesy
name). This device is actually a pair of devices, one that receives
signals from the future and another that transmits into the past.
Okay, how? The scientist (named Pat) has devised a code specifically
for the purpose of representing electronic circuits. Pat begins with
an ordinary radio receiver tuned between stations, waiting for the
static to temporarily resemble a signal with moderate information
content. Perhaps Pat has some specialized hardware that can search the
noise at high speed and automatically generate and test the encoded
signals it receives, because the experiment fails a multitude of times
before finally achieving some limited success.
Why limited success? If such a device is possible, presumably there
are very few designs that work perfectly, and very many designs that
work less well. The good designs are noise-free while the suboptimal
designs are less so. But because suboptimal designs are greater in
number and thus likelier to appear in the noise, the first device to
bootstrap itself transmits and receives noisily. So first Pat figures
out the likelier scenario of the following two: 1. Pat sends back the
exact design, and by pure chance it was received uncorrupted. 2. Pat
sends back a corrupted signal, and by pure chance the system noise
uncorrupted it. Then Pat consummates the causal loop by doing the
likelier thing.
Using this device, Pat is now in a position to search for a superior
design. This also requires numerous trials before succeeding, but not
nearly as many as would have been necessary when starting from scratch.
(Here I make the *wild* assumption that the number of designs increases
geometrically as the signal to noise ratio decreases.) Pat repeats the
procedure until an optimal or near-optimal design is found.
So what happens if Pat doesn't send a signal back after receiving it?
All that means is that the signal will be sent *somehow*, not
necessarily by Pat. This opens up a number of fun plot possibilities.
Maybe Pat never gets the chance to send the final design back! So who
will send it?
I also had the idea that most of the noise received in the earlier
designs is not system noise, but the sum of all the attempts to contact
Pat made throughout the future. After all, Pat's the original
inventor. In the optimal designs, the receiver is simply better tuned
to that particular transmitter.
So does anyone have any ideas about how to make my idea more
scientifically solid? I'm not too concerned about story ideas because
I probably will never write this story -- I'm not an author. I just
want to develop the idea and give someone else the chance to use it.
.
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