"I Am Time Loop" Fails While Marshall Barnes Wins 12/21/2012 Sweepstakes

Dec. 26, 2012 - PRLog -- "I solemnly swear, if at any point in life I have the ability to travel in Time and Space, I will visit myself December 21, 2012". That was the oath that thousands had taken as part of the, "I Am Time Loop" project (  http://vimeo.com/55920896 ) which was launched as another 12/21/2012 event to go along with all the others in relation to the end of the Mayan calendar. With 13,913 likes at last count on their Facebook page, I Am Time Loop has emerged as possibly the largest effort to popularize the potential reality of time travel, even if they don't quite understand it. Marshall Barnes, who is emerging as the world's leading authority on the subject, wasn't surprised then, when I Am Time Loop's Convergence parties around the world failed to produce any time travelers on December 21st as planned. Marshall himself spent the evening preparing his work for select members of Congress on the true physics of time travel, which will be released January 1st, and basking in the knowledge that his prediction for December 21st was the only one that came true.

"I like the I Am Time Loop movement, it' s just that's its predicated on a popular misunderstanding of the geometries of time travel, so it's doomed to fail", Marshall remarked. "I could have announced that it would, in advance, but I didn't want to rain on their parade, but its really quite obvious why it wouldn't work".

Marshall explains that the I Am Time Loop concept suffers from too many hidden assumptions, a concept that he is expert on and lectured about at the 2004 Mars Society Conference in Chicago. He laid out the problems by the numbers:

1. The assumption that time travel will be available to the same participants in the future who are promising to time travel now.

2. The assumption that anyone of them will be alive in the future.

3. The assumption that time actually can become a linear closed time-like loop.

4. The assumption that all time is now.

"1 and 2 are pretty straight forward as depending on opportunity," Marshall explained, "but 3 and 4 go right to the heart of the problem - that time doesn't work in closed time-like loops the way that they, and many physicists think, and that all time isn't now. All you have to do is look at the logo of the I Am Time Loop" movement to see it for yourself. It's a snake with the end of its tail in its mouth. There is a difference here. The tail isn't fused with the mouth - it's inside, so there is no perfect circle. If you start at the head and work around toward the tail, essentially you could keep going inside the mouth but then the tail would end and you'd be inside the snake and essentially that's what happens for real. And it takes time for you to travel that length as well, you just can't go from the head to the tail unless you go direclty backward but then you can't really say that you've traveled the snake either or done the loop. A closed time-like loop takes you back in time but into a parallel universe. So, just because they promise to visit themselves on a future date, from a later future, doesn't mean that they should expect to see themselves show up upon that date because that future that they'd be arriving from hasn't happened yet and when it does, they'd be going to the date in a parallel universe because it would be impossible for them to show up in this one".

Marshall explains that the loop is actually a coil, not a circle, and like many things physicists do, the loop is really just a 2 dimensional rendering of the proper geometry but that everyone has forgotten that, just that many physicists forget that 2 dimensional embedded diagrams of wormholes are not the way that wormholes actually look or work.

"Another way to look at it is that between the time the promise is made, and the event takes place, something could happen that would prevent the event. However, in the future they could travel back in time and arrive in a parallel universe where the event did take place and keep their promise. There's nothing ruling that out because it doesn't violate anything from quantum mechanics. However, the first version - their version does, because all travel backward in time must involve parallel universes, so the action that you initiate on one timeline - in this case the promise to travel back to a date, which at the time of the promise has not yet occurred, would be fulfilled in a parallel timeline. It's not so much that that action violates Copenhagen, for example, but the geometry that it uses would, and that geometry doesn't exist, as I am proving in my special report to Congress".

Marshall's report to select members of Congress will outline the fact that one of the key issues of time travel that have been misunderstood is that of geometry and that the geometry of time travel is more important than any action. Paradoxes are prevented by the geometries of time travel, not because of any action that takes place within them. Thus schemes, either for or against, paradoxes, are irrelevant because it's the geometries of time travel that determine if an action backward in time is possible or not.

"So, even though there's a new I Am Time Loop event set for 2013, the outcome may well be the same - no time travelers. However, one of these parallel universes that splits off from ours could send someone back to our timeline but the likelihood is nil. There's a near infinite number of them and there's still the sequential nature of time to deal with. It's all very complicated, but I am working it in a new formula that describes how the quantum mechanics and relativity would work together into a cogent description of that reality."

Marshall is encouraged by the enthusiasm of the I Am Time Loop project and its fans, even if they're a little misguided.

"This is a neat idea in general but neat ideas don't necessarily transfer into reality. I've seen others where people have tried to start a movement to make a time machine, but that only went so far. The subject of time travel is misunderstood enough, so while it's great to get the interest up, more solid information would probably be helpful. I mean, it doesn't really matter how many followers they get that promise to travel back in time, because none of them are working on time travel and the whole idea reflects that they don't quite understand it. Ironically, they say leadership is overrated but it's people like me, who are determined, focused and don't care about movements, that make breakthroughs. My hero, when I was a teen, was Todd Rundgren who said things like, 'I'd rather live by a dream than live by a lie, Don't you follow me now. Suffer them slings and arrows, be a real man, The world doesn't own me'. If I cared about what other people thought, if I gave a damn about what was socially acceptable according to some crowd, none of the things that I've accomplished would exist (bio http://informalscience.org/member/show/8498 ) because I have always been ahead of the crowd and been the first to do things, worked against the grain, thought outside the box and I still do today. The crowd, with their group-think is what Lee Smolin identified as what's holding physics back. The so-called crowd thinks Stephen Hawking is the smartest man on Earth and you'd have to be crazy to bet against him on something like the Higgs Boson, but I did it anyway because I actually understand what he writes (unlike most of his ardent fans) and knew that when he smarts off about something, he's usually wrong. Good thing I didn't think like the crowd, because now I've got bragging rights about that 'til the end of time ( http://www.prlog.org/11914207-higgs-boson-announcement-sh... ) - as well as the first prototype time machine in the world. But the thing is that, leaders have followers, whether its voluntary early adopters or the late comers, but I learned from Todd that the best leaders don't care if they have followers because what they do, they do for themselves. If someone else is into it, fine, but that's not what it's about. It's about your own vision and not letting anyone else get in the way of it, because it is always the crowd that does that and that's why the crowd is overrated.'"