Questions: Quantum Leap
- — April 1, 2010
When he’s not writing sci-fi novels, John Cramer
is trying to build a time machine in the basement
of the UW Physics Building
Photograph by Andrew Waits for City Arts.
University of Washington physics professor emeritus John Cramer is that rarest of things: a science writer who is also a real scientist. He works with the Relativistic Heavy Ion Collider at New York’s Brookhaven National Laboratory, where six Nobel Prizes were won. On the eve of Seattle’s sci-fi convention Norwescon, City Arts talked with him about writing, research and what Einstein called “spooky action at a distance” – pairs of particles that affect each others’ behavior instantly, even light-years apart. Impossible! But when experimenters measure it, the impossible actually happens. Cramer thinks particles may communicate via quantum waves traveling backwards in time. At UW, he has been busy splitting laser photons with crystals to see if he can send a message back in time. Now, that’s spooky!
How did you become a columnist for the leading science fiction magazine?
I wrote a paper describing how you could tell whether a supernova was made of matter or antimatter, and sent it to Gene Wolf, a prominent SF writer and a childhood friend. He sent it to the editor of Analog Science Fiction and Fact magazine, who said, how’d you like to write a popular version of this?
How did your first novel, Twistor (1989), happen?
I was snookered into writing it. I wanted editor David Hartwell to publish an anthology of my Analog columns about nifty ideas in physics and have SF writers write short stories about them. He said, write a novel and get your agent to package it with the anthology. David bought the novel, not the anthology.
You got writer’s block when you tried to start the novel, and a kidney stone saved you. How?
Group Health shot me up with Demerol. I came home miserable, sat at the computer – and suddenly it just sort of seemed to flow out my fingers. In a week I had sixty thousand words.
Did your day job at the lab affect your creative process?
We used program management software to build a new accelerator, to break up the job into pieces. At two a.m., I woke up and realized that perfectly fit the structure of a novel: these characters, these scenes, they had to be interleaved. So I made a Program Evaluation and Review Technique chart and saw there were holes in the two or three plotlines running parallel.
The story is set in a UW Physics lab. What’s the main plot?
A postdoc and a grad student produce an electromagnetic field which rotates normal matter into shadow matter and vice versa. There’s another earth made of shadow matter in orbit with our earth.
What’s wrong with the way science fiction depicts scientists?
They never seem to be having enough fun. And they don’t make enough mistakes or have as many wrong ideas as they should.
What’s the point of your current experiment?
To test whether nonlocality can be used for human communication, then whether we can tap Nature’s private back-in-time telephone line to send our own messages. In principle, you could run two light beams, one from Alice through ten kilometers of fiber optics and it would take fifty microseconds to get to the end. Bob would receive the message with his photons (that did not go through a long fiber) fifty microseconds earlier. And so you’d be sending messages fifty microseconds backwards in time. Chances are my experiment will fail. I’m writing a novel in which it succeeds.
What if it did?
You could send messages backwards in time. I asked people involved in the stock market, if you could send messages back in time, at what point could you make lots of money? They said a millisecond would be great. Goldman Sachs moved their server farm to be closer to the Stock Exchange so they could reduce the time delay for buy commands by a few milliseconds.
What else happens?
Stephen Hawking has something called the chronology protection conjecture. If you produce a time loop that comes close to violating causality, you might produce a quantum bomb and cause the apparatus to explode. That’s going to be in my next novel. I expect to have it done by June.
What else are you working on?
I bought an orchard with my daughter. We applied for a grant to make low-ethanol alcohol. I would like to make apple brandy that tastes like cognac instead of paint thinner. •
John Cramer will be a guest of honor at the grand Seattle science fiction convention, Norwescon (April 1–4 at SeaTac Doubletree). Famous Tor Books editor David Hartwell will be there, too. Visit norwescon.org for information.
