Einstein was wrong you can beat the damn game

[maxmaxus]

As many of you have already guessed I refer to Einstein and his famous quote that the only way to win at roulette will be to steal money from the casino...obviously meaning that you can't devise a mathematical strategy to beat roulette. Over the years of course some people have tried to beat the game while "cheating", that is using machanical devices, but no mathematical strategy is know to beat roulette - and i can confirm that...you can't win in the long term in the so called "fair game"(0 expected value) let alone in a game with negative expectation - such as the roulette. According to money management formulas, like the kelly criterion you shouldn't obviously even try to enter in such game, I've studied potental usage of the parrondo paradox whereas playing a sequence of losing games turn into a winning game...but the trick there is that you actually play 3 games one of which must have a positive expectation and the overall play reduces your mean - so you should only play the winning game in order to be profitable. Finally, i have used the heuristic approach and wrote myself programs in php,c#, etc. to try and test different strategies for fair and negative games and none of them "gained" money after thousands "bets".

Now...what this has to do with relativity?
Answer: It's a very well known fact that one can literally time travel due to time dilation, but up until the last decade or so time travel to the past was nearly a fairytale...not even a science fiction, despite the ideas of warp drives dating back to the 30s. So, as you have guessed already, the winning strategy will be to go to the future -> see the outcome and then go back and place the bet. So, why is this still a hypothetical winning strategy? Because it's almost a dogma these days to think that in order to create a time travel to the past, one would need an exotic matter and the possibility of existence of such matter will be relatively as big as solving for example the baryon assymetry problem - that is...some forces work better for matter, some regions of space have more antimatter...or both - but still these explanations aren't complete because we don't have empirical evidence - so it won't be too bold to claim that no physical theory is complete without an experimental evidence, but this is a modus operandi in physics rather than an absolute truth. Exotic matter should and will be found.
Perhaps in the next 100 years time machine will most likely be build, the challenge is whether the people who build it will share the invention or keep the gold formula just for their own pleasure?

10x...and discuss...i could write more later...

 

[Fredrik]

the winning strategy will be to go to the future -> see the outcome and then go back and place the bet.

Time dilation can get you to age slower than the rest of us, but it certainly can't be used to go back in time.

The optimal roulette strategy was described by Mike Caro a long time ago. It can be found on lots of web pages now, e.g. http://www.wonderouswes.com/2006/05/mike-caro-has-roulette-strategy.html .

You might also want to take another look at the forum rules. There's a rule against overly speculative posts.

 

[familia]

I believe what fredrik says is correct in my view although I'm not an expert on time dilation
but time only slows down for the traveler inside the machine the rest of the universe keeps going at the same rate as it has before the traveler got into the machine the only difference is that he would have aged less than the rest of the universe

 

[Phrak]

I seem to recall the invention of exotic matter was the result of science fiction author, Isaac Asimov writing Tippler and Thorn for a plausible (in the fictional world) means to obtain faster than light travel.

There is not scientific evident this material should exist.

 

[pervect]

Carl Sagan was the author, I think - for "Contact".

 

[maxmaxus]

Time dilation can get you to age slower than the rest of us, but it certainly can't be used to go back in time.

The optimal roulette strategy was described by Mike Caro a long time ago. It can be found on lots of web pages now, e.g. http://www.wonderouswes.com/2006/05/mike-caro-has-roulette-strategy.html .

You might also want to take another look at the forum rules. There's a rule against overly speculative posts.

Time dilation has nothing to do with traveling back in time...even it's name implies that you aren't "teleporting through time", but just shorting time, e.q. time can be made smaller but not negative. The problems arise when you refer to going back and grandfather paradox, etc. And...I will be probably banned and stoned to death for saying this, but I think that even Hawking doesn't understand quite the concept of spacetime. Basically he argues that since we don't see tourists from the future - then time travel to the past is impossible - however it could be possible, only that whenever you go back in time - the possibility to belong to your initial time will be 1/infinity...which is 0, or even if not zero than one in infinity is clear enough explanation.

 

[maxmaxus]

I seem to recall the invention of exotic matter was the result of science fiction author, Isaac Asimov writing Tippler and Thorn for a plausible (in the fictional world) means to obtain faster than light travel.

There is not scientific evident this material should exist.

The casimir effect currently is the closest candidate. However, even we assume that it produces exotic matter, taking advantage of it would be close to impossible. I can explain later with some mathematical sense as well.

 

[scope]

The casimir effect currently is the closest candidate. However, even we assume that it produces exotic matter, taking advantage of it would be close to impossible. I can explain later with some mathematical sense as well.

what is the relationship of the Casimir effect with exotic matter and time travel?

 

[maxmaxus]

what is the relationship of the Casimir effect with exotic matter and time travel?

"Exotic matter with negative energy density may be required to stabilize a wormhole.[19] Morris, Thorne and Yurtsever pointed out that the quantum mechanics of the Casimir effect can be used to produce a locally mass-negative region of space-time,[20] and suggested that negative effect could be used to stabilize a wormhole to allow faster than light travel. This concept has been used extensively in science fiction."

Or here...: http://www.bibliotecapleyades.net/ciencia/negativeenergy/negativeenergy.htm

...i can find more references than again...

 

[JesseM]

Not that it's relevant to the physics issues discussed on this thread, but about that Einstein roulette quote, there's a lot of fake Einstein quotes out there and I suspect this is one of them, it doesn't appear on his wikiquote page and searching google books for "einstein", "roulette" and "steal" doesn't turn up any books that actually give an original source for the quote...

 

[JesseM]

"Exotic matter with negative energy density may be required to stabilize a wormhole.[19] Morris, Thorne and Yurtsever pointed out that the quantum mechanics of the Casimir effect can be used to produce a locally mass-negative region of space-time,[20] and suggested that negative effect could be used to stabilize a wormhole to allow faster than light travel. This concept has been used extensively in science fiction."

Note though that it's unclear whether the Casimir effect would actually be sufficiently "exotic" to make a traversable wormhole, see this section of the wikipedia wormhole article:

To see why exotic matter is required, consider an incoming light front traveling along geodesics, which then crosses the wormhole and re-expands on the other side. The expansion goes from negative to positive. As the wormhole neck is of finite size, we would not expect caustics to develop, at least within the vicinity of the neck. According to the optical Raychaudhuri's theorem, this requires a violation of the averaged null energy condition. Quantum effects such as the Casimir effect cannot violate the averaged null energy condition in any neighborhood of space with zero curvature,[15] but calculations in semiclassical gravity suggest that quantum effects may be able to violate this condition in curved spacetime.[16] Even if they can, it may be that quantum effects cannot violate a weaker condition known as the "achronal averaged null energy condition", and that this could rule out the possibility of traversable wormholes.[17]

 

[Phrak]

Carl Sagan was the author, I think - for "Contact".

Good catch.

From this web page http://library.thinkquest.org/27930/wormhole.htm":

"In 1985, cosmologist Kip Thorne was asked by science popularizer Carl Sagan to devise a hypothetical traversible wormhole. Thorne and his collaborators then created what was a remarkably simple solution that would in theory connect two periods in time. The wormhole would not rip its occupants apart, would stay open for the duration of a trip through, would not freeze its occupants inside, and would not create time paradoxes. However, it would require a never-observed form of exotic matter whose total energy is negative."