It can take a village to save science -- a village that so far includes a Las Vegas music mogul, Kirkland rocket scientist, Port Townsend artist, Bothell chemist, Louisiana gas-and-oil man with a place in Port Angeles and a Savannah, Ga., computer programmer.

The public has stepped forward with cash to boldly go where nobody in the mainstream scientific establishment wants to go -- or, at least, to have to pay for the attempt to go.

Backward. In time, that is.

A University of Washington scientist who could not obtain funding from traditional research agencies to test his idea that light particles act in reverse time has received more than $35,000 from folks nationwide who didn't want to see this admittedly far-fetched idea go unexplored.


What John Cramer is proposing to do is certainly outside the box. It's about quantum retrocausality.

"He's looking into the fundamental qualities of the universe," said Denny Gmur, a scientist who works for a biotechnology firm in Bothell. "I had $2,000 set aside to buy myself a really nice guitar, but I thought, you know, I'd rather support something that's really mind-boggling and cool."







"It could involve signaling, or communication, in reverse time," he said. Physicists John Wheeler and Richard Feynman years ago promoted this idea of "retrocausality" as worth considering. Cramer's version aimed at using retrocausality to resolve the EPR paradox is dubbed (by him) the "transactional interpretation of quantum mechanics."

Most physicists, such as the celebrated cosmologist Stephen Hawking, still believe time can move only in one direction -- forward. Cramer contends there is no hard and fast reason why.



On Sunday, he began his annual stint running particle physics experiments at the Brookhaven National Laboratory's Relativistic Heavy Ion Collider. He and others at the national lab use the supercollider to smash together particles, create the hottest matter ever made by humans and study things such as quarks or other subatomic particles.

Cramer, who also writes science fiction books as a hobby, earlier worked at CERN, the world's largest particle physics laboratory, on the border between France and Switzerland. In the 1980s, he was director of the UW's nuclear physics laboratory and today remains a well-respected experimental physicist.



None of the standard scientific funding agencies wanted any part of the project. NASA's Institute for Advanced Concepts sent Cramer a rejection letter, adding it was getting out of the advanced concepts business anyway -- now that most of the space agency's money is going to the federal government's renewed push into manned spaceflight.

The most creative branch of the military-science-industrial complex (known as DARPA, Defense Advanced Research Projects Agency) also rejected Cramer's proposal. Officials at DARPA told the UW physicist his experiment is "too weird" -- even though they recently gave money in support of a project aimed at creating Terminatorlike liquid robots.

"I thought we were going to have to pull the plug," Cramer said. But when word of his funding plight went out across the Internet a few months ago after a Seattle P-I article, people like Rudman and Gmur began contacting the UW to see if they could lend some support.

"Heck, if it works we can go back in time and get our money back," laughed John Crow, a businessman who splits his time between his gas-and-oil business in Shreveport and a home in Port Angeles.

Crow donated $3,000 because he found Cramer's approach too fascinating not to try.

"I'm just a crass businessman, but in business we know high risk offers high reward," he said. "This isn't that much money to find out if time can go both forward and backward."

Walter Kistler, a retired physicist and rocket scientist who started Redmond-based Kistler Aerospace, donated $5,000. Kistler's company struggled for many years unsuccessfully promoting the concept of reusable rockets, even going bankrupt once, but recently won a NASA contract.

"I know how difficult it can be to get people to even consider new or unusual ideas," he said. "Even Einstein had trouble accepting the basic ideas of quantum theory. I've talked to professor Cramer, and what he is trying to do could be very important."


"Artists have experienced non-local space all along, we just can't prove it," said Richard Miller, an artist and photographer in Port Townsend. Miller, who prefers not to disclose the amount of his donation, said he's not worried about the strong possibility of failure here.

"I would say the predicted failure of this project is probably a good omen," he said. "Most predictions are wrong."


"It wouldn't be as nice as a positive result, but it would certainly be interesting and publishable," Cramer said. If there is an interesting negative result or a half-positive result, he said he will buy more precise equipment to see if he can tease out what's happening. Cramer has all the money he needs for this phase, but he hopes to see a second phase.

In the music business, said Rudman, the Las Vegas music mogul, most records they produce don't do well. In the vernacular, he said, "They stiff."

"But the rare hits we get every once in a while pay for all the stiffs, and then some," Rudman said. "If this stiffs, it stiffs. But, man, you've got to try, don't you? You've got to be willing to take the risk of being wrong to find something new."