I went to the 100 Year Starship Symposium in Orlando, Florida, last year and presented some of my work on "Quantised Inertia and FTL". After my talk, this chap, a fellow presenter, Jack Sarfatti, stood up and said: "I'm very excited by your work, and it might even be true! However, what you need to ask is WHEN is your event horizon" (ie: the boundary I use for the Hubble-scale Casimir effect).
The next morning at breakfast a friendly chap from New York came and sat with me and said, in the nicest way possible, that my talk had reminded him why he'd left physics for the law. Anyway, I went to get my scrabbled eggs, plus watermelon on the side, and I saw Jack Sarfatti sitting alone at a table and said "Hello". He exploded out of his seat, and joined me and the lawyer. He quickly explained the holographic principle, how it explains why entropy increases, and again why he thinks I need to ask the question: "WHEN is my event horizon?". After 10 minutes of intensity my excluded lawyer friend stood up to go, and said to me: "It was nice meeting you" and then said to Jack: "Well, I didn't meet you, but it was very educational!". Jack didn't seem to notice this and carried on. I liked Jack immediately. Reading about him later, it seems he's dabbled into just about everything, but that's fine by me: to get good ideas you need lots of different ones, some crazy, so long as you do then test them properly. I do think it would be hard, in a conversation, to get him to listen for any length of time though.
I appreciated Jack's comment about causality. I have wondered for over 20 years how to make time flexible. I tried to write a paper (my first) back in 1992 suggesting a theory of fuzzy time, and someone from the physics department I'd just graduated from said: "Too woolly, you need to suggest a test, and also it sounds like Cramer". I learned then that John Cramer had suggested a transactional (noncausal) interpretation of quantum mechanics. Bizzarely, 20 years later it was him chairing our exotic session at the 100 Year Starship Symposium. Anyway, after over 20 years in physics I have learned to look for tests, so, for causality, where's the data to show the way?
Well, John Cramer is setting up a test for retrocausality, see: http://faculty.washington.edu/jcramer/
3 comments:
Delightful! Updates on advances in retro-causality and related topics are at my blog at http://stardrive.org
See also David Kaiser's (MIT) book "How the Hippies Saved Physics."
I had a good chat to Jack at 100 YSS too. We discussed his warp-drive concept in some detail. I really wish, in hindsight, we'd swapped notes, but that was before I got heavily into alternative inertia ideas. I was too busy with fusion drives and mass-beams.
My impression was that if you have a discussion with Jack Sarfatti then it's going to be 'in some detail' by default!
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