3D Fax Machine

Time travel is impossible. The very concept of time travel makes no sense, since time doesn't flow. The fact that we think time passes is just an accident of our nervous systems - of the way things look to us. In reality, time doesn't pass; we pass. Time itself is invariant. It just is. Therefore, past and future aren't separate locations, the way New York and Paris are separate locations. And since the past isn't a location, you can't travel to it.

The ITC technology has nothing to do with time travel, at least not directly. What they have developed is a form of space travel. To be precise, they can use quantum technology to manipulate an "orthogonal multiverse coordinate change". It means that they travel to another place in the multiverse. The multiverse is the world defined by quantum mechanics.

Quantum mechanics can be explained historically. A hundred years ago physicists understood that energy - like light or magnetism or electricity - took the form of continuously flowing waves. We still refer to 'radio waves' and 'light waves.' In fact, the recognition that all forms of energy shared this wavelike nature was one of the great achievements of nineteenth-century physics. But there was a small problem. It turned out that if you shined light on a metal plate, you got an electric current. The physicist Max Planck studied the relationship between the amount of light shining on the plate and the amount of electricity produced, and he concluded that energy wasn't a continuous wave. Instead, energy seemed to be composed of individual units, which he called quanta. "The discovery that energy came in quanta was the start of quantum physics.

A few years later, Albert Einstein showed that you could explain the photoelectric effect by assuming that light was composed of particles, which he called photons. These photons of light struck the metal plate and knocked off electrons, producing electricity. Mathematically, the equations worked. They fit the view that light consisted of particles.

And pretty soon, physicists began to realize that not only light, but all energy was composed of particles. In fact, all matter in the universe took the form of particles. Atoms were composed of heavy particles in the nucleus, light electrons buzzing around on the outside. So, according to the new thinking, everything is particles.

The particles are discrete units, or quanta. And the theory that describes how these particles behave is quantum theory. A major discovery of twentieth-century physics. Physicists continue to study these particles, and begin to realize they're very strange entities. You can't be sure where they are, you can't measure them exactly, and you can't predict what they will do. Sometimes they behave like particles, sometimes like waves. Sometimes two particles will interact with each other even though they're a million miles apart, with no connection between them. And so on. The theory is starting to seem extremely weird.

Two things happen to quantum theory. The first is that it gets confirmed, over and over. It's the most proven theory in the history of science. Supermarket scanners, lasers and computer chips all rely on quantum mechanics. So there is absolutely no doubt that quantum theory is the correct mathematical description of the universe. But the problem is, it's only a mathematical description. It's just a set of equations. And physicists couldn't visualize the world that was implied by those equations - it was too weird, too contradictory. Einstein, for one, didn't like that. He felt it meant the theory was flawed. But the theory kept getting confirmed, and the situation got worse and worse. Eventually, even scientists who won the Nobel Prize for contributions to quantum theory had to admit they didn't understand it.

So, this made a very odd situation. For most of the twentieth century, there's a theory of the universe that everyone uses, and everyone agrees is correct - but nobody can tell you what it is saying about the world. Many physicists tried to explain the equations. Each explanation failed for one reason or another. Then in 1957, a physicist named Hugh Everett proposed a daring new explanation. Everett claimed that our universe - the universe we see, the universe of rocks and trees and people and galaxies out in space - was just one of an infinite number of universes, existing side by side.

Each of these universes was constantly splitting, so there was a universe where Hitler lost the war, and another where he won; a universe where John F. Kennedy died, and another where he lived. And also a world where you brushed your teeth in the morning, and one where you didn't. And so forth, on and on and on. An infinity of worlds.

Everett called this the "many worlds interpretation" of quantum mechanics. His explanation was consistent with the quantum equations, but physicists found it very hard to accept. They didn't like the idea of all these worlds constantly splitting all the time. They found it unbelievable that reality could take this form.

Most physicists still refuse to accept it. Even though no one has ever shown it is wrong. Everett himself had no patience with his colleagues' objections. He insisted the theory was true, whether you liked it or not. If you disbelieved his theory, you were just being stodgy and old-fashioned, exactly like the scientists who disbelieved the Copernican theory that placed the sun at the center of the solar system - and which had also seemed unbelievable at the time. Because Everett claimed the many worlds concept was actually true. There really were multiple universes. And they were running right alongside our own. All these multiple universes were eventually referred to as a 'multiverse.'

Reality is much greater than just what we see in our universe. Other universes exist and they sometimes interact with our own universe. It's the nature of the multiverse. Within the multiverse, the universes are constantly splitting, which means that many other universes are very similar to ours. And it is the similar ones that interact.

Not all the universes are similar to ours. They are not all simultaneous to ours, therefore some universes exist at an earlier time. Actually, since they are infinite in number, the universes exist at all earlier times. ITC has the technology to travel to these other universes. They can make wormhole connections in quantum foam (wheeler foam), subatomic fluctuations of space-time.

Quantum foam is a remnant of the birth of the universe. The universe had begun as a single, very dense pinpoint of matter. Then, eight billion years ago, it exploded outward from that pinpoint - in what was known as the big bang. After the explosion, the universe expanded as a sphere. Except it wasn't an absolutely perfect sphere. Inside the sphere, the universe wasn't absolutely homogeneous - which is why we now have galaxies clumped and clustered irregularly in the universe, instead of being uniformly distributed. The expanding sphere had tiny, tiny imperfections in it. And the imperfections never got ironed out. They're still a part of the universe, at subatomic dimensions.

Quantum foam is just a way of saying that at very small dimensions, space-time has ripples and bubbles. At these very small, subatomic dimensions, the structure of space-time is irregular. It's not smooth, it's sort of bubbly and foamy. But the foam is smaller than an individual atomic particle. There are wormholes in that foam and they can be used travel. You can transmit anything, as long as you have a way to compress and encode it. Even the information for an entire human being.

The complete description of a human being - all the billions of cells, how they are interconnected, all the chemicals and molecules they contain, their biochemical state - consists of information they can compress by using a lossless fractal algorithm. They compress the information equivalent of a person with compression algorithms - methods to pack data on a computer, so they take up less space. Like JPEG and MPEG for visual material. All compression programs work the same way. They look for similarities in data. Suppose you have a picture of a rose, made up of a million pixels. Each pixel has a location and a color. That's three million pieces of information - a lot of data. But most of those pixels are going to be red, surrounded by other red pixels. So the program scans the picture line by line, and sees whether adjacent pixels are the same color. If they are, it writes an instruction to the computer that says make this pixel red, and also the next fifty pixels in the line. Then switch to gray, and make the next ten pixels gray. And so on. It doesn't store information for each individual point. It stores instructions for how to re-create the picture. And the data is cut to a tenth of what it was.

The description of a three-dimensional living object requires so much data that you need massive parallel processing. Parallel processing is when you hook several computers together and divide the job up among them, so it gets done faster. That much processing is done by using the quantum characteristics of individual electrons. This done by a quantum computer.

Ordinary computers make calculations using two electron states, which are designated one and zero. That's how all computers work, by pushing around ones and zeros. But Richard Feynman once suggested it might be possible to make an extremely powerful computer using all thirty-two quantum states of an electron. The advantage of these quantum computers is unimaginably great power - so great that you can describe and compress a three-dimensional living object into an electron stream. Exactly like a fax. You can then transmit the electron stream through a quantum foam wormhole and reconstruct it in another universe. And that's what ITC does. It's not quantum teleportation. It's not particle entanglement. It's direct transmission to another universe.

But this requires you to destroy the original, so that it can be reconstructed at the other end. You can't have one without the other. It's difficult to think of this in traditional terms. Since you're instantaneously reconstructed at the very moment you are destroyed you really haven't died. You've just moved somewhere else.

To rebuild someone, you don't need a fax machine at the other end. This is because at the moment of transmission, the person is already in the other universe. And therefore the person doesn't need to be rebuilt by ITC. Just call it a characteristic of the multiverse.

We don't have to do anything to get the interference pattern to occur. It just happens by itself. And this interaction is very reliable; it will always occur. In certain situations, we can count on other universes to make something happen. And, if we transmit through a wormhole, the person is always reconstituted at the other end. When you transmit, the person is being reconstituted by another universe.

The whole point of quantum technology is that it overlaps universes. When a quantum computer calculates - when all thirty-two quantum states of the electron are being used - the computer is technically carrying out those calculations in other universes.

It may be easier to understand by seeing it from the point of view of the other universe. That universe sees a person suddenly arrive. A person from another universe. And that's what happened. The person has come from another universe. Just not ours. The person didn't come from our universe. They came from a universe that is almost identical to ours - identical in every respect - except that they know how to reconstitute it at the other end.

A multiverse transfer creates a sort of potential energy, like a stretched spring that wants to snap back. So the machines can come home relatively easily.