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Paul Sutter (the "Spaceman") Makes My Points For Me: Why Most Physicists Know Nothing About True Time Travel Science

Dedicated to my late friend, Paul D. Setters, who would've gotten a kick out of it...

By Marshall BarnesPublished 6 years ago 26 min read
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Paul Sutter believes that videos recorded on Youtube are examples of time travel. See the video counter at :27. That's so bad, it's not even wrong...

I think we could all agree that if someone is going to speak or write on something, then they should at least know what they're talking about, right? Well, a couple of months ago, I wrote piece for Futurism.media about how time travel to the past is almost here and that probably everything you knew about time travel is wrong because most physicists talking about it don't work on the problem. Well, guess what's happened since? I've made more progress on my own research, which is putting me within shooting range of hitting a 2019 mark for my goal of actually doing time travel to the past (more on that in another piece) and I discovered the perfect example of what I wrote about in previous article. Ladies and gentleman, I introduce to you "the Spaceman", Paul Sutter, an astrophysicist from the Ohio State University who is also the chief scientist (as if they really need one) for COSI, a kiddie science center in Columbus, OH. Paul has a video and wrote an article for Space.com on time travel under its Expert Voices op-eds and was unwitting enough to prove EVERYTHING I had talked about before. Trust me, he is AMAZING and proves conclusively that he's no time travel expert. Just for convenience sake, I'll deal with what he says in the video, first.

He begins by discussing how space and time are connected, which is true, an argument I often use when successfully defending the existence of time against time deniers like Julian Barbour and Simon J. Morley. However, Paul quickly begins to show his deficiencies in the area of temporal mechanics when he starts comparing time with space. He talks about how we have all of this freedom to move in various directions in space but we can only move in one direction in time. Not strictly true. First of all, looking at it from the statement he made about time and space being connected, every direction you move in space, you are also moving in time. What Paul is talking about is the idea of moving in temporal directions, i.e. past, present and future. That's not the same thing and the reason I'm being a stickler on this point is because it matters. Let me explain...

Paul is an astrophysicist. I'm a temporal mechanic, conceptual theorist and advanced concept R&D engineer. I excel in time related matters, both physical, philosophical, psychological and conceptual and I've been at it for 20 years. So when Paul starts talking about the nature of time, he's talking in my field of expertise and I'm going to handle it that way, not dumb it down with all the hidden assumptions, like he has. So the first thing is that time is connected to every Planck space on every layer of the universe. Space is where things are. Time is what allows them to move, change, etc. Time is not change, is not motion, is not energy. Time also, doesn't flow. Time is static but malleable in two ways - first, because it is inextricably part of space, and as space expands, time moves with it. This is noted by Richard Muller, author of NOW: The Physics of Time, although misapplied, but important. Second, time is locally affected by reference frames that are either accelerated or in gravitational fields. This is standard special and general relativity, which I'll return to later. Now, I'll make my point on why time doesn't flow.

I came to that conclusion while working on my book, Space Warps and Time Tunnels: The Infamous Legacy of One Stephen W. Hawking.I wanted to tackle the nature of time in greater detail than I had before and was reviewing a documentary by Brian Greene on the topic. It came together for me as I saw him standing in a small stream talking about how now, physicists don't believe that time flows, unlike Einstein (and obviously Paul Sutter). I already knew that was the new theory but then later, Greene was talking about the asymmetry problem, the fact that time seems to have a single direction - toward the future, otherwise known as the arrow of time. Although the math can be run forward and backwards, we only see things happen in one direction. As Stephen Hawking put it, shattered tea cups aren't seen reassembling themselves, as they leap from the floor, back to the table. That's when I had an epiphany - if time doesn't flow then why should we expect to see things happen in reverse? Time isn't what we see when we say that things are going forward!

Here's what is actually happening. There is cause and effect, and those causes involve forces, energies etc. that are set in motion by other forces, energies etc. You hear a slapping sound at a baseball practice field because a pitcher threw a ball at a certain velocity and when that ball hit the catcher's mitt, it made a sound that was carried through the air to your ear drum. There are no forces that can cause that sound to travel backwards to that mitt and eject that ball through the air and back into the pitcher's hand. Forget about it. Reversing time won't work because time wasn't going forward. Besides, even if you could reverse time, the way that people erroneously think, there would have to be some method, some way to localize the effect because what you have to realize is that if you reverse time in the normal sense, everything will reverse - gravity, the temperatures, the expansion of the universe, rotation of the Earth, planetary orbits, tides, light, sound, biological functions for everything at all levels. Not only that, it would mean the very end of reality itself because nothing new would be happening!

The point being, if time is just that dimension that allows things to happen, then it is not the cause of them - it is neutral in that respect. The reason we never see things happen in reverse is because there is no way to cause that to happen. This discovery of mine resolves the time asymmetry problem that was baffling Brian Greene, and so many others. The math works in the equations because it has no true relationship to nature of reality, so of course the equations work both ways. That may sound strange, but I'm supported in my position by Vannevar Bush, the man who envisioned the concept of the Internet, but before that, helped save the free world from the Axis powers by marshaling together the best minds and talents in the U.S. under the National Research Defense Committee to concentrate on designs, inventions and discoveries that would help win WWII. He said,

"If scientific reasoning were limited to the logical processes of arithmetic, we should not get far in our understanding of the physical world. One might as well attempt to grasp the game of poker entirely by the use of the mathematics of probability".

Working on the physics of time related issues demands having an accurate model for the nature of time, a key element of understanding reality and a problem that I believe is behind the failure of John G. Cramer's retrocausality experiment after spending some $40,000 in donated money. The error is common among physicists who haven't done any serious work in temporal mechanics - the study of how time works as a physical entity, which Einstein's work only glazed over, and since many physicists operate under the mistaken notion that Einstein was the end all - be all, when it comes to time, they rarely move beyond him. Paul seems clearly to be one of those.

He asks the question of whether time travel is possible. Of course all of my regular readers already know the answer to that, and Paul seems to agree that it is possible but then quickly, like at 27 seconds in, he shows he has no understanding of temporal mechanics at all. He states that we're watching the video in his future which was recorded in our past, this after he mentions how the video signal travels through space from wherever Youtube is, to where we are.

"How can someone who might be dead talk to someone who might not be born yet?" he says at one point. Well Paul, it has to do, first of all, with the fact you're dealing with a recording. The same question could be said about any kind of recording - a book, a scroll or a tablet or sound recording of any kind. You would've had a point if you included the ability to communicate in real time, live, between two points separated by a space-like distance, or more importantly, a distance separated in space-time. That would've been time travel related communication.

At 1:40 on the video counter he states, the faster you move through space, the slower you move through time", which in the strictest sense is wrong. That statement ignores the fact that time and space are connected or at least ignores what that means. What Paul, and all other scientists like him, is doing is solely looking at the fact that the faster you go or the stronger a gravitational field might be, the slower your clock will move. That, however, DOES NOT MEAN that you're going through time slower. It means that the high velocity, or the intense gravity, is distorting time as you go through it, thus producing the slower clock rate. I might add, that space is being distorted simultaneously, after all, gravity is warped space-time. You have to account for the fact that at every Planck length that you've moved through, there was also a bit of time there, so you can't be moving through space at one rate and literally be moving through time at another. Anyone knowing temporal mechanics would have seen that clearly.

Paul's next faux pas, comes in the article he wrote, accompanying the video. Paul starts invoking time dilation via special relativity, using the same kind of error I wrote about before -

"If you could build a big enough rocket (don't ask me how, that's an engineering problem)..."

which is just another way of saying "if you can do the near impossible", because right when you reach 40% of the speed of light with your big rocket, all the energy you use to continue acceleration starts adding to your mass, which is the old fashion way of saying that space-time starts piling up in front of you. There's other "engineering problems", like what you're going to use as fuel that will give you enough power to even try the dynamics suggested (for more, read this BBC article which even mentions my track chair from the 2013 100 Year Starship Symposium, Eric Davis. You can see my name,first author under Key Distances In Space and Time, page 8), which is why these stereotypical ideas are non-starters and merely advertise that the person suggesting them, no matter who they may be, aren't serious about time travel. What he says next, makes this obvious -

"to provide a constant acceleration of 1g (9.8 meters per second per second; the same acceleration as provided by the Earth's gravity at its surface), you could reach the center of the Milky Way galaxy — a healthy 20,000 light-years away — in just a couple decades of your personal time."

That's not happening. There's no way yet to build a space craft that will do that. Plus, who's going to pay for it? Who's going to pay the cost that will produce zero benefit for another 40,000 years? Not even with a warp drive because the warp drive metric doesn't provide the time dilation effect, so you're aging will be at the normal rate, and you'll be dead before you can complete your journey, which in this case, Paul suggests will put you 40,000 years into Earth's future by the time you return.

That's when something about Paul's math rang false. He says, "By the time you return...about 40,000 years would've passed on the Earth." NOT SO FAST! as Michio Kaku would say. On one hand, he says the center of the Milky Way is 20,000 light years away YET he states that when you get back "about" 40,000 light years would've past on Earth. Only if you would've been going at the speed of light, pal! 20K LYs out and back at sub-light speeds, not accounting for the time spent building up velocity out and back - and the turn around time, doesn't add up to about 40,000 years, in my book. But guess what folks? It doesn't add up in NASA's either. I've just checked with NASA and poor Paul's figures are off - the Milky Way's center is 26,000 LYs away from here, not 20,000. NASA says

"If it (Voyager) could travel at the speed of light...it would still take over 26,000 years to arrive!"

So, based on NASA's estimation, there's no way that sub-light speeds could get a spacecraft to a destination - out and back, in a total of 40K years. I'm not so sure Paul's even an expert in astrophysics either!

That, of course, brings us to another point that I've made before - time dilation doesn't provide true time travel. Why not? Because you're actually doing something all that time while you're waiting to "arrive in the future". You might as well develop a means of suspended animation - it would be a lot easier and cheaper, I can tell you that. But that is one of the key red flags of all those so-called time travel solutions by these professional physicists who are rank amateurs when it come to time travel science - but want to waste your time yapping about the same non-starter solutions, as if they mean something.

Paul then states, "To ask if we can go into reverse is the domain of general relativity", showing where the complete cut-off point is for his understanding of time, especially as related to the subject of time travel. Time travel to the past has nothing at all to do with the direction of time. Period. Remember - time isn't moving. It is not a film strip against which everything happens. Reversing the direction of time means everything going backward and I've already shown what that results in. Here's yet another example, from Futurism.com, and a story they promoted with the headline,Physicists Have Created a Set of Conditions in Which Time Seems to Run in Reverse, which of course is bollocks, proved entirely by this line alone -

"In other words, the study revealed the thermodynamic equivalent of reversing time in a very tiny pocket of the Universe", supported by -

'We observe a spontaneous heat flow from the cold to the hot system,' the team writes in the study."

Note, the admission that it was the "thermodynamic equivalent" of reversing time but not reversing time at all. This supports my contention that it is processes that happen within a causal framework which are looked at as time, yet are not time and that time doesn't flow - which threatens the entire legitimacy of CTCs having anything to do with time travel, beyond being sheer mathematical graphs (mathematics that have no relationship to reality)!

Paul then brings up how GR permits CTCs (closed time-like curves) and proves again that he's out of the loop (pun intended).

Closed time-like curves are paths through space-time which loop back toward the past. What physicists like Paul forget, however, is that their geometry connects again, in many cases, with where they started, providing problematic conditions for those attempting to use them for time travel solutions - like Paul. The problem of CTCs has also been noticed by Bryan Roberts of the University of Pittsburgh in his paper, Closed Timelike Curves, from December of 2008, as I noted in my 2011 paper, Experimental and Theoretical Analysis of Chronology Protection Conjecture Failing On The Discovery Channel. Under section 2: What is a Closed Timelike Curve?, Roberts states that “Some physicists seem to identify CTCs with time travel, but this is somewhat of a misnomer. Traveling along a CTC would be more like what Nietzsche called ‘eternal recurrence’, in which one’s life repeats again and again, than it would be like traveling in Doc’s DeLorean”.

Another problem, which I've cited before, was noticed by Sean Carroll involving how it is that the loop connects with the beginning again. In my 2010 paper, The New Rules of Time Travel and Sean Carroll's Gate, in response to his The Real Rules of Time Travel for Discover magazine, I focused on other aspects of the CTC question that Carroll raised, as to whether or not you had any free will involved. I had never assumed that that would be a problem, but now I disagree. This is where Carroll did us all a service by questioning it, although he didn't do it very well. Nonetheless, Carroll's effort should be lauded and stands in stark contrast to Paul Sutter's offering, from which he appears to be little more than a mimic and a hack, when it comes to the time travel discussion - offering absolutely no new insights or observations, and more than a few misnomers, so earning my branding him a rank amateur.

This is critically important because, once again, when "time" repeats (meaning those things that happen during a certain time period) that means nothing new happens. The result, on its face, means certain death for anyone who enters one and doesn't escape before its completion, but further still, I believe that there are only two options - either CTCs are mere mathematical graphs (anomalies with no basis in reality) or they are spirals that loop through parallel universes.

However, with the new way of looking at time, CTCs are looking more and more like they're just graphs. "A closed timelike curve can be created if a series of such light cones are set up so as to loop back on themselves, so it would be possible for an object to move around this loop and return to the same place and time that it started", says Wikipedia but notice there's no description for what it means to return to the same place and time. That's a MAJOR problem, because energy could follow the same path and build-up to explode, as Hawking has conjectured, however there is still more to this. There is also the distinct possibility that the energy won't build-up because when the loop is complete, everything will repeat the way it was before, which would also include the energy. So the question then remains, what happens to that energy, as well as everything else, as Carroll questioned. CTCs also violate Copenhagen interpretation of quantum mechanics which states that there's only one outcome per measurement, in other words, you can't have a re-do, i.e. change the past on the same timeline.

Furthermore, when you look at what a light cone does, it actually shows the direction that causality goes (not time itself), as what is referred to as time is depicted moving from the present to the future. However, what is moving is everything within that light cone through space-time and not any flow of time.

What this means is when light cones tip over and appear to show that movement is moving toward the past, it really isn't. How can it be? The key thing that physicists never deal with is if everything in that light cone is now going to the past, what is happening to that past? As I said, it appears more and more that CTCs aren't real and are just mathematical graphs.

Fortunately, it appears that a solution is at hand, one I discovered when doing research into retrocausality and was able to prove that retrocausal results actually occur in new, parallel universe copies of the present with different pasts, or discontinuous pasts. Retrocausality states that it is possible to change the past of a particle by changing the path it has taken prior to it being detected. Changing the past, however is paradoxical and because I had created a formula that disproves such shenanigans, I found the entire notion of retrocausality problematic and demanding a resolution. I applied my formula to the standard retrocausal scenario and found that it not only ruled out changing the past but created a new, parallel universe copy of the present - but with a new past. In other words, the past isn't changed, the present is and it has a different past.

I predicted this in my 2013 special report to select members of Congress, which is now the book,Paradox Lost: The True Geometries of Time Travel.

Long story short, I conducted a series of experiments, as well as did conceptual research, and found not only were my experiments reproducible but matched the type of predicted results of German astrophysicist, Rainer Plaga for his proposal on detecting parallel universes. They also supported John Archibald Wheeler's conjecture on the existence of a Participatory Universe and project how that can be the key to time travel to the past.

In the final analysis, any action that would change the past produces a new, parallel universe copy of the past in some form - either as part of a new parallel universe copy of the present or a new parallel universe copy of the past as the present, i.e. the result of time travel. CTCs not required. In fact, any attempt to form a CTC, as an exercise in General Relativity, would cause such a new parallel universe copy of the past and then terminate that geometry because all such results are discontinuous, meaning, there is no causal link to the former universe, thus no paradoxes.

Considering that there is both physical and experimental evidence for this and none whatsoever for CTCs, I'll dismiss any arguments in favor of CTCs as Paul Sutter views them.

"In GR, we ask a slightly more technical question: Is there any arrangement of matter and energy (the stuff that warps space-time) to permit the existence of closed time-like curves, or CTCs?"

Brace yourself. It all goes down hill fast from there on. Paul next says there's "about half a dozen known configurations of space-time that allow CTCs, or time travel into the past" but the first one he references is the most obviously irrelevant one - Kurt Gödel's CTCs that only exist if the universe is rotating. Of course it's NOT and Paul even says, "But Gödel's point was moot — all observations indicate that the universe is not rotating, so that particular solution does not apply to our universe, and time travel into the past is verboten." Then why even bring it up, Paul? But he's not done with the ridiculousness!

"Ah! But what if we were to construct an infinitely long massive cylinder and set it spinning on its axis near the speed of light..."

Of course that's not possible, so once again, we have him wasting our time with nonsense, pretending it really matters. It's at this point where it becomes obvious that when it comes to matters involving a serious discussion of time travel, Paul Sutters is somewhere in the neighborhood of Bill Nye the Science Guy, which could also explain why he's at COSI instead of the Perimeter Institute.

"What's going on? General relativity allows — in principle — time travel into the past, but it appears to be ruled out in every case. It seems like something funny is afoot, that there ought to be some fundamental rule to disallow time travel. But there isn't one."

I know exactly what's a foot - Sutter, and other physicists of his ilk, aren't smart enough to see the obvious truth right before their eyes! The key to time travel isn't found in either theories of Relativity! Yet, they all seem intent on proving Einstein incorrect on one count - the definition of insanity. Einstein said, "The definition of insanity is doing the same thing, over and over, and expecting different results" and that's exactly what Sutter and his ilk do as he has admitted, as if Einstein was wrong about that.

Then Paul leaps to talking about entropy and how it "explains why an egg will never just happen to unscramble itself if you leave it alone long enough".

"Is time linked to entropy? Maybe, but that's the subject of another article…."

NO! Please NOT another one! I'll answer the question now - not any more than time is linked to anything else and entropy has nothing to do with time travel!

To understand why, review my previous article for Futurism.media -Time Travel To The Past Is Almost Here...

He then says you can "Learn more by listening to the episode 'Is time travel possible?' on the Ask A Spaceman podcast". There - just to be fair, I put in that plug, knowing full well you probably realize by now you'll learn absolutely nothing useful by wasting your time listening. But to make up for it, here's something that you can learn from - what I call the Course In Time Travel Study List. If you don't want to be like Paul and you actually want to get an appropriate background in true time travel science, this is what you have to study and why -

1. Both theories of Relativity (just so you know what everyone else knows and why you can avoid it)

2. Teleparallelism (Einstein's unfinished Unified Field Theory of gravity and electromagnetism. Because it provides the power solutions without the enormous requirements of General Relativity)

3. The Principle of Resonance (just do it so you'll know how to apply it to #4)

4. Rene Thom's Catastrophe Theory ( the study of how things can build up within a system and cause sudden changes )

5. Crystallography (the study of crystalline structures, i.e. metal - think fuselages, craft bodies)

6. Buckminster Fuller's designs (think fuselages, test chambers, and time stations)

7. Black holes (as an extension of GR)

8. Wormholes (as an extension of GR and understanding multiply connected spaces)

9. Spooky Action at a Distance (beyond quantum entanglement )

10. Bell's Theorem (standard entanglement)

11. Quantum Teleportation (entanglement used to teleport information)

12. John Archibald Wheeler's 'it from bit' (pertaining to the information basis of the universe)

13. Torsion physics (the effects of twisting on space-time structures)

14. Closed Time-like Curves (to understand theoretical space-time geometries which others think are connected to time travel)

15.The Five Factors Proving the Parallel Universes of Hugh Everett III and John Archibald Wheeler (so you can know why parallel universes are now proved real and why)

16. Tim Folger Discover's a Time Machine (time machine structure)

17. Tesseracts (for geometric descriptions of multiple realities)

18. Spatial 4th dimension (same reason as #17 and as how other spaces can connect outside of those that are compactified)

19. Retrocausality (to understand a basic, conceptual element of time travel)

20. Quantum Mechanics (to understand a key element of time travel and the nature of reality

21. Temporal Mechanics (to understand the nature of time)

22. Synchronicity (to understand a key link to the Participatory Universe)

23. The Participatory Universe ( to understand the nature of reality and how to manipulate it)

24. Nikola Tesla's Intelligent Energy (to contemplate the application of esoteric physics)

25. Information physics and a digital universe (as a basis for reality, i.e. 'it from bit')

26. Quantum and Macroscopic Quantum Tunneling (think travel methods)

25. Time slips (anecdotal evidence of natural time travel geometries that mimic the latest time travel method discoveries)

26. Time Travel Paradoxes (by reading my book, Paradox Lost: The True Geometries of Time Travel based on my special report for select members of the United States Congress)

27. Chaos Mathematics and Fractal Geometry

28. Differential Equations (As a means of mental programming and exercise to recognize relationships across multiple systems and causal relationships)

Study all of those topics with a focus on how they can relate to time travel solutions without paradoxes, both in theory, conceptually and technologically, and you'll be able to bury people like Paul Sutters in any time travel conversation. While you're at it, read about, or the works of these guys - Gabriel Kron, John Archibald Wheeler, Hugh Everett III, H. David Froning, Nikola Tesla, N. A. Kozyrev, Alain Aspect, Rene Thom, R. Buckminster Fuller, Vannevar Bush, J. R. Oppenheimer, Nick Herbert, Fred Alan Wolf, Jack Sarfatti, E.E. Witmer, Gregory Meholic, Seth Lloyd, Yakir Aharonov, Rainer Plaga, John Stewart Bell, Benoit Mandelbrot, Bernhard Riemann, Henri Poincare, Edwin Abbott, Norbert Weiner, John von Neumann, Oswald Veblen, T. Townsend Brown, Francis Bitter, Ilya Prigogine, Richard Hamming and Claude Shannon, knowing that not all their positions are correct or germane to the topic, but you need to know about them, nonetheless, to have a proper, well rounded education in the foundations of the science of time travel.

Information science genius, Claude Shannon, felt the need to put our temporal plight in a famous quote:

That of course is the problem that time travel scientists want resolved. It was another information wizard, Richard Hamming, who put the plight of scientists and exotic, advanced concept research, into sharp focus -

"Great scientists have thought through, in a careful way, a number of important problems in their field, and they keep an eye on wondering how to attack them. Let me warn you, `important problem' must be phrased carefully. The three outstanding problems in physics, in a certain sense, were never worked on while I was at Bell Labs. By important I mean guaranteed a Nobel Prize and any sum of money you want to mention. We didn't work on (1) time travel, (2) teleportation, and (3) antigravity. They are not important problems because we do not have an attack. It's not the consequence that makes a problem important, it is that you have a reasonable attack...When I say that most scientists don't work on important problems, I mean it in that sense. The average scientist...spends almost all his time working on problems which he believes will not be important and he also doesn't believe that they will lead to important problems."

And that, exactly describes Paul Sutter and others like him - the average scientist. Yet, Paul's faking that he knows important work, in Hamming's sense, when he doesn't even have a reasonable attack, like I do, and wouldn't know the first thing about how to get one because he doesn't know the first thing about this subject, so how could he?!

I also like Hamming because he's another genius that understood the limitations of mathematics, like Vannevar Bush, in relation to understanding reality:

Speaking of Vannevar, in closing, I have a fitting quote from my science hero, "As long as scientists are free to pursue the truth wherever it may lead, there will be a flow of new scientific knowledge to those who can apply it to practical problems."

That's why we haven't had time travel yet, because as Stephen Hawking, Kip Thorne and others have duly noted, scientists haven't had that freedom, and the lack of knowledge, as exhibited by Paul Sutter, is a dramatic example of that fact. However, from my efforts, and those of my fellows, we will soon enough...As Buckminster Fuller said, "To change things, build a new model that makes the existing model obsolete."

And for crying out loud - if you want to learn about time travel, ask a temporal mechanic - not a frickin' "spaceman"!

Paul Sutter, those like him - and the time travel science they espouse, are now totally and utterly, obsolete!

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