EthanT
Member
Yet another neat article addressing the potential for retrocausality in Quantum Mechanics, as is shown perhaps best in Yakir Arahonov's formulation of QM, Time Symmetric Quantum Mechanics.
http://nautil.us/issue/9/time/the-quantum-mechanics-of-fate
The entanglement thing as viewed in the quote above also seems to be the Penrose/Hammeroff preferred way of viewing the phenomenon, as well.
This caught the attention of the Daily Grail as it reminded them of Daryl Bem's recent psi studies ;-)
http://www.dailygrail.com/Fresh-Sci...der-Whether-the-Future-Can-Influence-the-Past
http://nautil.us/issue/9/time/the-quantum-mechanics-of-fate
Physicists as renowned as John Wheeler, Richard Feynman, Dennis Sciama, and Yakir Aharonov have speculated that causality is a two-headed arrow and the future might influence the past. Today, the leading advocate of this position is Huw Price, a University of Cambridge philosopher who specializes in the physics of time. “The answer to the question, ‘Could the world be such that we do have a limited amount of control over the past,’ ” Price says, “is yes.” What’s more, Price and others argue that the evidence for such control has been staring at us for more than half a century.
That evidence, they say, is something called entanglement, a signature feature of quantum mechanics...
...The standard interpretation of entanglement is that there is some kind of instant communication happening between the two particles. Any communication between them would have to travel the intervening distance instantaneously—that is, infinitely fast. That is plainly faster than light, a speed of communication prohibited by the theory of relativity.
...Price asks us to consider the impossible: that doing something to either of the entangled particles causes effects which travel backward in time to the point in the past when the two particles were close together and interacting strongly. At that point, information from the future is exchanged, each particle alters the behavior of its partner, and these effects then carry forward into the future again. There is no need for instantaneous communication, and no violation of relativity.
...
At first glance, this interpretation of entanglement replaces one troublesome behavior—instantaneous communication across arbitrary distances—with another—information traveling backward in time. But should we actually be troubled by the idea of information from the future traveling into the past? After all, mathematically, entanglement in time is identical to entanglement in space, and we have no qualms with information traveling in all directions across space.
...
Other researchers are using retrocausality to explain existing results. For example, Price’s collaborator, theoretical physicist Ken Wharton of San José State University, argues that retrocausality is a natural way to understand a process known as frustrated spontaneous emission. An atom that normally emits light will cease emitting when its surroundings become incapable of absorbing that light. Thus one event (emission) depends on something that does or doesn’t happen in the future (absorption). “That’s one of the examples of a particle probing the future and seeing what’s there, and then making a decision based on it, and just not decaying,” Wharton says. “It’s hard to understand in a causal model.”
The entanglement thing as viewed in the quote above also seems to be the Penrose/Hammeroff preferred way of viewing the phenomenon, as well.
This caught the attention of the Daily Grail as it reminded them of Daryl Bem's recent psi studies ;-)
http://www.dailygrail.com/Fresh-Sci...der-Whether-the-Future-Can-Influence-the-Past
Nevertheless, I couldn't help thinking of Professor Daryl Bem's controversial findings that suggest humans may have the ability to 'feel the future'. I wonder what those physicists investigating retrocausality might say about what it allows in terms of presentiment in humans - still inconceivable, or is it a mechanism for such an effect?
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