Air Force report calls for $7.5M to study psychic teleportation

[superjoint]

By Dan Vergano, USA TODAY
Star Trek fans may be happy to hear that the Air Force has paid to study psychic teleportation.

But scientists aren't so thrilled.


The Air Force Research Lab's August "Teleportation Physics Report," posted earlier this week on the Federation of American Scientists (FAS) Web site, struck a raw nerve with physicists and critics of wasteful military spending.



In the report, author Eric Davis says psychic teleportation, moving yourself from location to location through mind powers, is "quite real and can be controlled." The 88-page report also reviews a range of teleportation concepts and experiments:



• Quantum teleportation, a technique demonstrated in the last decade that shifts the characteristics, but not the location, of sub-atomic particles at great distances.



• Wormholes, a highly theoretical possibility whereby the intense gravitational field near black holes could rip open entrances to distant locales.



• Psychokinesis, or psychic teleportation. In support of the idea, the report cites UFO reports, Soviet and Chinese studies of psychics and U.S. military studies of spoon-bending phenomena.



"It is in large part crackpot physics," says physicist Lawrence Krauss of Case Western Reserve University, author of The Physics of Star Trek, a book detailing the physical limits that prevent teleportation. He describes the Air Force report as "some things adapted from reasonable theoretical studies, and other things from nonsensical ones."



Some experts have long criticized what they see as a military sweet tooth for junk science. A "remote viewing" project, for example, undertaken by defense intelligence services and declassified in 1994, sought to see whether psychic powers could be employed to spy on the Soviet Union. The teleportation report "raises questions of scientific quality control at the Air Force," the FAS' Steven Aftergood says.



Davis, a physicist with Warp Drive Metrics of Las Vegas, couldn't be reached for comment. The Air Force paid $25,000 for the report, part of a $20.5 million advanced rocket and missile design contract. The report calls for $7.5 million to conduct psychic teleportation experiments.



"The views expressed in the report are those of the author and do not necessarily reflect the official policy of the Air Force, the Department of Defense (news - web sites) or the U.S. Government," says an Air Force Research Lab (AFRL) statement sent to USA TODAY. "There are no plans by the AFRL Propulsion Directorate for additional funding on this contract."



Explaining why the lab sponsored the study, AFRL spokesman Ranney Adams said, "If we don't turn over stones, we don't know if we have missed something."

[AppalledWithMe]

Here's my problem, not so much with teleportation, but with the same idea of using wormholes for time travel. I was watching Discovery Science, cause i'm a dork, and most of the shit about time-space curvature went over my head (as it did in my Astronomy 100 class). However, if we can "go back" or "go ahead" in time, this would imply that our entire existence is playing out at the same time. I don't care if time and space can bend, you cannot go to a time that no longer exists. Like, by going back in time, as that time shared the same space we take up today, today would have to disappear, or there wouldn't be any room for the past to re-exist. Or, they suggested you'd be travelling to another dimension, so that it doesn't fuck with your own reality. But, who's to say there is a dimension that exists exactly as our past did, and then you're not traveling into your own world's past, you're travelling into someone else's. I don't even know if that makes any sense, thinking about quantum and astrophysics makes me want to drool.

[!!!]

AWM the reason, I think, that there can be many different times and spaces in one reality is because say our time, the present time is linear like ____________________. Yet there can also exists another time that is going like this: |, vertically. Then there can be other times that go diagonally and all other which ways until you have a cricle. Now I am not sure if this is right, that is just what I think. each reality can be a billionth of a degree in difference to another one because in geometry the planes and points take up no space and have no mass. thus there can be inifite times and places but it is just unnerving to understand and see. I hope that helps. I am no physicistbut my roomate is and he describes shit like that to me all the time.