Earlier quoted context omitted.
I like this concept. Is there any sci-fi based on this premise?
Aliens in the movie Arrival perceive time in circular fashion, basically live in future and past.
Just saying, this is a pretty big spoiler.
A growing number of scientists are convinced the future influences the past
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Re: A growing number of scientists are convinced the future influences the past
#102> It may seem eerie to our brains, which process events sequentially, but the history of science is also littered with examples of human biases leading to bad conclusions, such as the Earth-centric model of the solar system. Slow down. Assuming that time moves in one direction is not comparable to geocentrism.
I disagree, I think the comparison is pretty reasonable.
Your entire experience of the world is defined and limited by the fact that your brain "only processes information in one direction of time" (for lack of better wording). Your personal experience does not necessarily map correctly to the real world. The same is true for both examples.
Re: A growing number of scientists are convinced the future influences the past
#103> It may seem eerie to our brains, which process events sequentially, but the history of science is also littered with examples of human biases leading to bad conclusions, such as the Earth-centric model of the solar system. Slow down. Assuming that time moves in one direction is not comparable to geocentrism.
It is because in both cases, you can work out that you'll never make an observation that really proves it one way or the other, but you might come up with some laws of physics that are more conveniently expressed in one way than another. They're both ultimately questions about your coordinate system, and in fact it is easier to invert time than it is to work out how everything's supposed to function in a rotating+sun…
If we reverse time and this implies running everything backwards in physics, do we include gravity in the set of things that are reversed? Then everything would fly off the face of the earth in reverse-time.
Re: A growing number of scientists are convinced the future influences the past
#104As a non-physicist I'm not sure I'm interpreting this correctly. Does this essentially mean that all states in time already exist and our consciousness is just traversing this 4D space in one direction on the time axis? If so, does that mean that the big bang could actually be the end of the universe and we're just experiencing time in "reverse" toward an initial starting state that we perceive as the future?
I like this concept. Is there any sci-fi based on this premise?
The Nolan film "Tenet" is based entirely around the idea of reversible causality.
Re: A growing number of scientists are convinced the future influences the past
#105> It may seem eerie to our brains, which process events sequentially, but the history of science is also littered with examples of human biases leading to bad conclusions, such as the Earth-centric model of the solar system. Slow down. Assuming that time moves in one direction is not comparable to geocentrism.
Yep. Someone else already pointed out the well known counterargument to symmetry below regarding thermodynamics. You typically don't see scrambled eggs become whole again. I think that's pretty hard evidence to overcome.
Granted, I'm not a physicist and I'm sure any physicist working on this totally understands that. Just wanted to point it out.
Re: A growing number of scientists are convinced the future influences the past
#106> It may seem eerie to our brains, which process events sequentially, but the history of science is also littered with examples of human biases leading to bad conclusions, such as the Earth-centric model of the solar system. Slow down. Assuming that time moves in one direction is not comparable to geocentrism.
Assuming that time "moves" kinda is
Re: A growing number of scientists are convinced the future influences the past
#107As a non-physicist I'm not sure I'm interpreting this correctly. Does this essentially mean that all states in time already exist and our consciousness is just traversing this 4D space in one direction on the time axis? If so, does that mean that the big bang could actually be the end of the universe and we're just experiencing time in "reverse" toward an initial starting state that we perceive as the future?
Interestingly, the norm of your 4D speed vector is constant, IIRC: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/World_line
Re: A growing number of scientists are convinced the future influences the past
#108> It may seem eerie to our brains, which process events sequentially, but the history of science is also littered with examples of human biases leading to bad conclusions, such as the Earth-centric model of the solar system. Slow down. Assuming that time moves in one direction is not comparable to geocentrism.
It is because in both cases, you can work out that you'll never make an observation that really proves it one way or the other, but you might come up with some laws of physics that are more conveniently expressed in one way than another. They're both ultimately questions about your coordinate system, and in fact it is easier to invert time than it is to work out how everything's supposed to function in a rotating+sun…
It isn't because we have the observations we have. It might be mathematically easy to invert time, but empirically it's not so simple. Mathematical symmetries and expressions are nice, but then the actual physical consequences and requirements (e.g., material, time, energy inputs) sort of force one's hand.
Also, geocentrism is actually disproven by numerous observations, which in fact guided the mathematical formulation of our current physics.
One thing is (almost) certain: the laws of physics as we know them (i.e. the Standard Model and General Relativity) are incomplete ("wrong"). That doesn't mean any old model is equivalent or as useful as either, though.
Re: A growing number of scientists are convinced the future influences the past
#109I used to believe that the world is lazily loaded. That means the first moment I see something (e.g., a world map) is the point where all the past history to consistently explain the observation gets "locked in".
Was coming to say something like this. Gets to some fun conclusions - ex. paleontologists invent dinosaurs by looking for them. Another angle on it would be showing that the universe has multiple possible levels of detail - that objects behave like newtonian point masses most of the time, that digestion is replaced by a simple hunger meter when nobody's paying attention. From this direction, time's main function is c…
That would also mean that when I don't see or hear other people, they don't "exist" as physical things that can be seen or heard until I encounter a situation in which they would be.
It's the same as "If a tree falls in the forest and nobody is around to hear it, does it make a sound?"
But then again, that information has to be stored somewhere right?
Like, if a tree falls in the woods and nobody is around, sure you can say it isn't being perceived so it won't be "rendered" but the moment someone walks in the forest and sees that fallen tree, it would need to be rendered from some information about the fall and information of how it looked before the fall. That information would have to be sitting somewhere in limbo waiting to be rendered. So why not just actually let it sit IN the rendered "realm" and now you have one place for data to live in. You save on data transfer fees too.
Re: A growing number of scientists are convinced the future influences the past
#110> “You have to be very careful in a retrocausal model because the fact of the matter is, we can't send signals back in time,” Adlam explained. “It's important that we can't, because if we could, then we could produce all sorts of vehicles or paradoxes. You have to make sure your model doesn't allow that.”
This rings false to my scifi-trained brain. Paradoxes emerge when information about the future allows you to change it in some way. But if the future is truly immutable, there's no reason why you can't learn what it will be. Any attempts you make to alter it will only result in the exact thing that you already knew would happen.
Maybe I'm misunderstanding the author. Maybe what they MEANT to say is if you didn't already receive an email from your future self 5 years ago, then you can't send one today that your past self will receive at that time. Just as the future is immutable, so is the past. But if we had some sort of quantum email that allowed for such a thing, it WOULD be possible to go check it today and find a message from yourself 5 years in the future.