Mallett's Miller Time problem

V

VinnieLT

Temporal Novice
Mallett\'s Miller Time problem

After "thought-experimenting" with Mallett's proposed device, I have a question. Can anybody direct me to a discussion of the following:

So, say I build one of those things, start it up, then start up my ol' trusty photon detector and wait. Yow! Sure enough... out pops a photon from my Mallett time machine that looks to be exactly what I hoped to find. Yes! I like the way this photon looks, so I name it -- p[0]. It's Miller Time! I celebrate!

The next morning, I wake up with a bit of a hangover, head back to my lab and turn on my photon detector again. Immediately, I capture another photon emitted from my time machine. I name it p[1].

But as I examine p[1], I start thinking that it looks suspiciously like p[0]. In fact, it looks so much like p[0] that I can't shake the feeling that they're the -same- photons at different times. What...?

How could I have seen p[0] yesterday if I captured it today? Or, doesn't every photon p[n] have to pass through each day?

Or, more directly, how does a signal sent in in the future know when to emerge? Won't _every_ particle emerge at the same instant, all super-imposed and jumbled, either at the instant I turn it on or at the latest instant that particles can emerge? We tend to think of "signals" serially; but this is _time_ we're thinking of here.

Therefore, the real question: Is it reasonable that Mallett's time machine might both work perfectly and be absolutely worthless at the same time? In fact, if it does indeed work perfectly, won't it necessarily be absolutely worthless?
 
Re: Mallett\'s Miller Time problem

Come to think of it, what happens to the Law of Conservation of Matter/Energy if I send a photon out of my time and into the past?
 
Re: Mallett\'s Miller Time problem

Come to think of it, what happens to the Law of Conservation of Matter/Energy if I send a photon out of my time and into the past?
Click to expand...

Vinnie,

One problem is this: subatomic particles, and I include photons, don't have little serial number labels on them. That's a fundamental axiom of quantum theory. You can't tell one photon from another photon thus you can't really say that Photon A traveled from Point X to Point Y while Photon B traveled from Y to X. They don't have definite momenta, positions, frequencies, etc.

Another answer is that the conservation laws are only valid in your local frame. The future and the past are "unobservables" from your present. The conservation laws don't strictly apply to the unobservable frames of reference.
 
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