Possible to win the Powerball Lotto using antimatter?
- From: generaldisarray76@xxxxxxxxx
- Date: Mon, 2 Feb 2009 12:35:49 -0800 (PST)
( This is an almost certainly dumb idea. I'm curious, but pretty
physics-ignorant. Still I hope it has amusement value at least. )
If antimatter is indistinguishable from the matter counterpart
traveling backward in time, which supposedly it is, then ( if it
really were traveling backward in time ) wouldn't the following be
possible:
1) Obtain a few atoms of antimatter, and keep them corralled in such a
way that you can use fields to impart some property on them like
charge or spin or whatever.
2) Measure their states interpreting the results as bits of a number
which will be tomorrows winning lotto draw. Reset the states of the
antimatter atoms to the measured values if the measurement would have
an effect on the state.
3) Buy the indicated powerball lotto ticket.
4) Promise yourself that once the winning numbers are drawn, for each
zero in the winning bit-string, you will use a process that will
randomize the state of the corresponding antimatter atom if it is
zero, and that for each 1, you will use a process that will randomize
the state if it is 1. Note that such a process exists if a process to
randomize at all exists. Merely measure the state, and do the
randomization or reset the value to the measured value depending on
the result.
5) You should have had to randomize all the atoms because the states
you first measured should have been the winning ticket.
6) !!!PROFIT!!!
Why might this work? Consider it from the point of view of the
antimatter atoms traveling backward in time ( which for them is
forward in time ). The whole thing starts when someone reads off the
winning powerball numbers powerball.com, and sets the state of each
antimatter atom ( which started having a random state ) to a 1 or a 0
so that the states of the antimatter atoms together correspond to the
bitstring representing the winning powerball ticket. Then some days
later from the point of view of the antimatter atoms, someone measures
their states and buys the winning powerball ticket. Because that
someone is made of matter, they appear to you to be traveling backward
in time to when the winning numbers were announced. But for them,
that is the future, and they are destined to win the lotto.
.
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