CIMG6483 John Cramer at ApolloCon 2007

John Cramer at ApolloCon 2007

CIMG6483 John Cramer, a physicist and a science fiction writer

CIMG6483 John Cramer, A physicist and a SF writer, gave a talk at ApolloCon 2007 about an experiment he is planning to perform that will explore a possibility of faster than light communication via quantum entanglement. This is impossible in the conventional view. If this experiment succeeds, it will mean it is possible to send signals back in time, which creates a whole lot of paradoxes, including the Immaculate Conception paradox and the Bilking paradox, from which Cramer draws an intriguing science-fictional implication. He wrote about it in the Alternate View column for the Analog science fiction magazine. (I had a link for it once, but over time that link had gone stale. I tried to find it on the internet again, and I think it may be this article — E.)

Cramer and his students tried to perform this experiment earlier, only to find out that they didn’t have the right equipment for detecting the entangled photons, and the right equipment is very costly. So a local newspaper reporter offered to contact the right people who could raise money for this experiment. Soon thereafter Cramer started getting calls from charitable foundations and such, that wanted to contribute financially to his experiment. It didn’t take them long to raise 40,000.

The talk was rather heavy on technical details, but there were some humorous moments too. A guy from the audience asked: if your experiment in fact works, could those 40K be money you sent back to yourself from the future?

ApolloCon used to be a speculative fiction convention in Houston, Texas.