This is 'What the Bleep!?: Down the Rabbit Hole' all over again. Just because something happens in Quantum Physics doesn't mean humans can influence their pasts.
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
#202Earlier quoted context omitted.
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.
If the direction of time is reversed, the eggs become whole again, but your memory of them once being scrambled is reversed, too, so you don't notice anything unusual. (It's like a rollback of database transaction, where not only the database state, but also the state of everything, including your brain, is getting rolled back)
That would suggest a kind of "super timeline" I'd imagine.
Re: A growing number of scientists are convinced the future influences the past
#203Earlier quoted context omitted.
The comparison is bad all around. Geocentrism actually had decent reasoning and was not a superstition. It's just we couldn't see the parallax with then-current instruments. As soon as instruments allowed, humanity changed rather quickly.
Time moving in one direction actually has decent reasoning and is not a superstition. It's just we can't detect time moving backwards with now-current instruments. As soon as instruments allow, humanity will change rather quickly.
The problem with the comparison is what it's used to imply. The popular understanding* is that scientists believed in religious dogma, and that led them to 'unscientific' geocentrism and believing that time has only one direction. It's a backhanded accusation of superstition, and that's unfair towards both current scientists and past scientists.
(On a personal note, I'm actually sympathetic to the article's retrocasual proposition. I suspect reality is non-local and TSVF etc. naturally tend towards non-locality.)
* This is Vice, of course they use the popular understanding and not something more sophisticated.
Re: A growing number of scientists are convinced the future influences the past
#204The laws of physics are symmetric in time in classical Newtonian mechanics already. E.g. a swinging pendulum looks the same in time, forward and backward.
What's not symmetric is in the area of thermodynamics and statistical mechanics; E.g. we never observe shards of glass spontaneously reassembling into a window pane.
Re: A growing number of scientists are convinced the future influences the past
#205Interesting because it messes with the school of thought that everything is determined already and we're just following a sequence of actions that arise from the starting conditions of the universe. If causality is broken then maybe we have free will?
The compatibilist view is that there is no contradiction between free will and determinism, because free will refers to macro states and determinism refers to micro states. In addition, in the many-worlds view of quantum mechanics, we don’t follow just a single sequence of events, but all physically possible sequences of events, where the points where sequences branch off each other can correspond to different decisi…
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Re: A growing number of scientists are convinced the future influences the past
#206The end is not unlike the beginning, in that it has been written to exactitude. “The pen has been lifted and the ink is dried”. Side note: does anyone remember when Vice was “fringe” in its content? I mean, ten or so years ago…
The first time somebody showed me an article in Vice it was ~2010 and the article was about the style and fashion of how bricks of heroine were being branded. so ... yeah.
Re: A growing number of scientists are convinced the future influences the past
#207Earlier quoted context omitted.
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.
If the direction of time is reversed, the eggs become whole again, but your memory of them once being scrambled is reversed, too, so you don't notice anything unusual. (It's like a rollback of database transaction, where not only the database state, but also the state of everything, including your brain, is getting rolled back)
But is there any evidence of that? Or is it just a thought experiment? I need to read more of the article, but appreciate you giving me some food for thought.
Re: A growing number of scientists are convinced the future influences the past
#208There's an interesting short story "Story of Your Life" by Ted Chiang that is related to this concept. It was the motivation for the movie arrival (though IMO is much better - the movie adds some drama that does not exist in the short story)
Phenomenal film. Full of interesting ideas and heartache. Pairs well with Annihilation.
Re: A growing number of scientists are convinced the future influences the past
#209I'm attempting to recall an analogy from a paper about this subject. One of the authors gave the analogy of time being like a river. If we are traveling down this river, and the river is changing speed ahead (maybe due to rocks or a sharp bend), then it is correct to say that the river is changing the past (our present location in the river), since our speed would then start to change as we approach the new point.
Re: A growing number of scientists are convinced the future influences the past
#210There's an interesting short story "Story of Your Life" by Ted Chiang that is related to this concept. It was the motivation for the movie arrival (though IMO is much better - the movie adds some drama that does not exist in the short story)
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