I have just finished the draft of a new time-travel novel, Isaac Newton & The Alchemist's Lad - The Perils of Entanglement, featuring Isaac Newton from 1666 and present-day ten year old Fred - who tells Isaac "My teacher says you were quite bright - in your day." The book is a very readable adventure for young-adults and the young at heart, which has the added bonus of introducing and explaining particle and astrophysics. It misstates two new-physicists' howlers - that you can no doubt spot and untangle as you read.
The means by which they travel through time from 1666 to 2018, then back again, is based on the well attested and fully accepted sub-atomic or quantum theory of entanglement. Einstein at first refused to accept the theory of entanglement, dubbing it "spooky action at a distance." Not only did the spooky action spook Albert but the theory also allows - or requires - that particles communicate over these spooky, sometimes long, distances, at faster than the speed-of-light. This, as you all know is impossible because Einstein proved that "Nothing travels faster than Light!"
His theories have been subjected to hundreds of experimental tests over the past one-hundred years, and have been conclusively proved to be correct.
Basically, when two photons are created from the splitting of another particle - often from electrons - the two new photons waste no time and zip off at the speed of light in opposite directions. Though they might journey to the horizon of the Observable Universe, forty-three-point-seven billion light years distant (so you can double that distance if they go to opposite horizons) - the photons, entangled photons, are in communication at all times. They are like identical-twins who are separated at birth and taken to different continents without any communication - yet still look the same, wear the same clothes, have the same hairstyles and both like pistachio ice-cream. They are mysteriously in touch. They are communicating - somehow. They are spookily "entangled".
What irked Einstein even more about these impertinent photons, was and is the fact that they were separating at the speed of light, three-hundred-thousand kilometres per second; and so it was and is impossible for them to receive messages from each other - because "Nothing travels faster than Light". No signal could ever catch up with the flighty photons. But, science proves and has proved time after time, that they are in touch. They chat to each to other all the time.
All objects in the universe, all things, are made of compressed photons. You, me, your parents and pebbles on the beach are all made from photons. An atomic explosion of, say just 100 lbs of uranium releases and reveals all the photons it contains in an instant, immense explosion as the light and heat locked in there for eons is freed and made visible. The photons are entangled - then blow apart - but still communicating. So - I used this as a time travel mechanism. I teased out of Isaac Newton, with a radio beam, a few of his entangled photons. Because each was in communication, all the photons, trillions of photons, followed each other along the beam "Beam me up Scottie!"
By esoteric methods and science that I must keep secret - at the end of their journey from 1666 to 2018, the photons reassembled themselves in the right order and relationships - and re-made Isaac Newton - and he met Fred. The entangled photons knew their precise positions and functions to re-create Isaac. Time travel is made possible - without magic.
It occurred to me this morning that this power to disassemble and reassemble must also be true for the several trillion cells in the human body. They know their functions; they cooperate; they communicate; new cells know their roles in the business of life; trillions of these immensely complex little factories know what to do - to make an organism that functions - that has a brain - has will and that can sometimes think. BUT HOW?
Whether it is photons making a kilogram of uranium, or cells making a human; how do they know when there are enough? How do they know when to stop adding units to the object? How do they know how to confer a particular identity to the object - or to us?
Like Goldilocks and the Three Bears - these minuscule packets of energy know when the object is too hot, too cold or, miraculously, is just right. A new human baby grows from one, a single cell, to two-trillion cells in nine months. How does it know when it has assembled enough units to trigger birth? This sweet little baby then grows into a 17 stone football player - of about 56 trillion cells; all communicating and swapping information - in a very spooky manner. But how does this hairy heavyweight know where its boundaries are. Why not keep adding cells - randomly? Where does the template - the governing pattern reside? We think we know it is governed by DNA, by inherited DNA, but where is the template, the controller, to assemble trillions of tiny particles into functioning DNA? My guess is that it is in the Aether, in Space-Time, in patterns of electromagnetic light and radio waves.
Is it therefore possible, as I've imagined in my book, to dis-integrate, transport, and re-integrate the constituent parts of an object - of a human being - in full working order? Could we, one day in the future, use photon-entanglement at microscopic levels thousands of times smaller than a human cell, to separate the photons, persuade them to ride on a carefully calibrated radio beam - travelling or propagating even faster than light (in a timeless fashion) - and have them utilize their entanglement to bring all their chums with them, and re-form elsewhere in exactly the same relationships and functions as when they started the journey? Carefully managed - we could be immortal, as envisaged in SF movies where humans upload into computers - but without the need for computers.
"Beam me up Scotty" indeed.
______
The extraordinary, precise communications between cells, molecules, atoms, sub-atomic particles and templates which enable organisms to transcend the sum of their parts, to function - and aspire to act intelligently, are the mysterious mechanisms or force of life.
I want to explore the concept of a fully functioning human - whose parts are self-evidently communicating correctly, as nature intends - and who is communicating with his/her community; the community without which we would certainly die or never come to life - going into outer or "deep" space, progressively losing the communications with family, tribe, race and planet. Will this super-lonely body also lose the inner communications between all the particles - and thus disintegrate? Do our inner communications depend on our environment, the teeming electromagnetic ocean in which we swim, with, currently, seven billion other humans?
The "Isaac" time-travel novel above, imagines that if entangled particles communicate, then teasing a single particle to hitch-hike on a radio-beam will trigger the adjacent particle to follow, then the next, and the next - ad-infinitum. The proven, demonstrable spooky quantum-entanglement might, could, or should inform each particle of it's unique place - in its ordained and accepted order - in the original body (mass). On arrival, at the target of the radio-beam, the second (entangled) particle will attach to the first, then the third will find its position, then the fourth, then the cascade of trillions of communicating particles will take their places - and rebuild the original body, in the new location.
Our bodies do not have a definitive "edge". The trillions of mutually dependent cells, each happily playing its appointed role, if examined under an electron-microscope, viewing the alleged boundary, skin or integument, are seen to be loosely attached. A few drift away from our skin at all times. If rubbed, millions fall away and scatter. Most house dust consists of discarded human skin cells. The skin is bombarded with incoming particles, rays, beams, light. Where our skin meets the universe there is a zone of constant interchange. There is no thin red line - or brown, black, yellow line of demarcation which says "This person stops here." But somehow, we know where we end. We know our permitted shape and size - and in turn all the cells know. And if they know their function and place, then so do the molecules, made of atoms, made of sub-atomic-particles, made of light - within our supposedly private person. They all know their place. All parts are communicating; communicating vital data and energy. If they get it wrong we die. We disintegrate, we fall apart.
For seventy or a hundred years or so - they get it right. From our entangled photons to our factory-like cells, all the bits get it right. And we live. We are the product of all these communications. "We" ourselves - our unique identities - exist as an intelligent organism (with some notable exceptions) only because "our" sub-atomic-particles, which in isolation we might regard as dead or inert packets of energy, constantly, tirelessly, persistently communicate - with meaning and purpose. We integrate these countless trillions of communications and make sense of them. We are brilliant examples of the Life-Force.
However, we are not alone. Counting only our seven-billion or so living primate relatives and leaving aside the billions of other living creatures - and assuming that only the Earth produces life, we are forever receiving and broadcasting electromagnetic signals to each other. Such signals alter our DNA. We are changed by everyone and by everything we encounter. These communications are possibly the energy and organisation that create the Life-Force.
If one of us drifts into deep-space, far from such life-giving communications and energies - too far to receive and send - momentarily happy to get away from it all, because as Sartre told us "Hell is other People" - would we survive?
In the vast ocean of life, we are bombarded with waves of coherent data and information. We are literally "informed" by the signals we receive (and send). Our skin passes on the electromagnetic data to our (entangled) inner cells and down to our entangled-photons. Without this maelstrom of information, of vital communication from the entire universe - would we cease to exist?
When we do eventually succumb, as our number is called, as our three-score-years-and-ten, with added time for good behaviour, runs out - and our personal identity communications cease - is the pattern of all our communications on record, still broadcasting out to the 43.7 b.l.y. horizon of the observable universe? Is our essential self still entangled? Do our very personal entangled photons bounce back from the edge of time and reassemble, reintegrate and form another, quite similar creation?
______
The extraordinary, precise communications between cells, molecules, atoms, sub-atomic particles and templates which enable organisms to transcend the sum of their parts, to function - and aspire to act intelligently, are the mysterious mechanisms or force of life.
I want to explore the concept of a fully functioning human - whose parts are self-evidently communicating correctly, as nature intends - and who is communicating with his/her community; the community without which we would certainly die or never come to life - going into outer or "deep" space, progressively losing the communications with family, tribe, race and planet. Will this super-lonely body also lose the inner communications between all the particles - and thus disintegrate? Do our inner communications depend on our environment, the teeming electromagnetic ocean in which we swim, with, currently, seven billion other humans?
The "Isaac" time-travel novel above, imagines that if entangled particles communicate, then teasing a single particle to hitch-hike on a radio-beam will trigger the adjacent particle to follow, then the next, and the next - ad-infinitum. The proven, demonstrable spooky quantum-entanglement might, could, or should inform each particle of it's unique place - in its ordained and accepted order - in the original body (mass). On arrival, at the target of the radio-beam, the second (entangled) particle will attach to the first, then the third will find its position, then the fourth, then the cascade of trillions of communicating particles will take their places - and rebuild the original body, in the new location.
Our bodies do not have a definitive "edge". The trillions of mutually dependent cells, each happily playing its appointed role, if examined under an electron-microscope, viewing the alleged boundary, skin or integument, are seen to be loosely attached. A few drift away from our skin at all times. If rubbed, millions fall away and scatter. Most house dust consists of discarded human skin cells. The skin is bombarded with incoming particles, rays, beams, light. Where our skin meets the universe there is a zone of constant interchange. There is no thin red line - or brown, black, yellow line of demarcation which says "This person stops here." But somehow, we know where we end. We know our permitted shape and size - and in turn all the cells know. And if they know their function and place, then so do the molecules, made of atoms, made of sub-atomic-particles, made of light - within our supposedly private person. They all know their place. All parts are communicating; communicating vital data and energy. If they get it wrong we die. We disintegrate, we fall apart.
For seventy or a hundred years or so - they get it right. From our entangled photons to our factory-like cells, all the bits get it right. And we live. We are the product of all these communications. "We" ourselves - our unique identities - exist as an intelligent organism (with some notable exceptions) only because "our" sub-atomic-particles, which in isolation we might regard as dead or inert packets of energy, constantly, tirelessly, persistently communicate - with meaning and purpose. We integrate these countless trillions of communications and make sense of them. We are brilliant examples of the Life-Force.
However, we are not alone. Counting only our seven-billion or so living primate relatives and leaving aside the billions of other living creatures - and assuming that only the Earth produces life, we are forever receiving and broadcasting electromagnetic signals to each other. Such signals alter our DNA. We are changed by everyone and by everything we encounter. These communications are possibly the energy and organisation that create the Life-Force.
If one of us drifts into deep-space, far from such life-giving communications and energies - too far to receive and send - momentarily happy to get away from it all, because as Sartre told us "Hell is other People" - would we survive?
In the vast ocean of life, we are bombarded with waves of coherent data and information. We are literally "informed" by the signals we receive (and send). Our skin passes on the electromagnetic data to our (entangled) inner cells and down to our entangled-photons. Without this maelstrom of information, of vital communication from the entire universe - would we cease to exist?
When we do eventually succumb, as our number is called, as our three-score-years-and-ten, with added time for good behaviour, runs out - and our personal identity communications cease - is the pattern of all our communications on record, still broadcasting out to the 43.7 b.l.y. horizon of the observable universe? Is our essential self still entangled? Do our very personal entangled photons bounce back from the edge of time and reassemble, reintegrate and form another, quite similar creation?
