It's an article about QM. On Vice. About a QM thought experiment. On Vice. Why would there be any expectation of scientific rigor whatsoever? "retrocausality, may seem like science fiction grist at first glance" Stop there, vice.
[dead]
A growing number of scientists are convinced the future influences the past
251–260 of 455 posts
Re: A growing number of scientists are convinced the future influences the past
#252Earlier quoted context omitted.
If we change the analogy of throwing a ball to firing a gun into the air - does the analogy still work? Since when we fire the gun up, the bullet will travel faster up than it will travel down due to terminal velocity in forward time. How is that phenomenon explained in reverse time?
Instead of predominately striking the bullet in a way that causes it to slow down, the molecules in the air will predominately strike it in a way that causes it to move faster, in what looks like an unbelievable (but still physically possible) run of good luck.
So it seems like if we reverse time, we reverse entropy and that as time approaches 0, we would effectively be reversing the big bang and instead have the big collapse.
Another thought experiment that comes to mind is compressed gas in a cylinder. When we open the valve, the gas in the cylinder comes out. In reverse time, the gas would go back into the cannister and the valve would close after the gas went back in. Very low probability of that happening in forward time, though not not 0.
Though it seems weird, because why does the gas go into the cylinder? Because further into reverse-time, something sucked it all out (in forward-time, this machine is the compressor that put the gas in the cylider.) This hurts my brain!
Re: A growing number of scientists are convinced the future influences the past
#253Recently, I came across the Feynman-Wheeler handshake[1-ish], which lead to the Transactional Interpretation[2] of quantum mechanics, which lead to the Afshar experiment[3]
I've come to conclude that all of these are consistent, but that they are a metaphorical truth, in that you shouldn't interpret them as literal truth.
Gun safety advocates teach "All Guns are Loaded", another metaphorical truth. If you behave as if it were true, you will generally live longer, and be safer.
The math underlying quantum mechanics has all sorts of non-intuitive interpretations, and is often used as a gateway to woo-woo theories. I'm allergic to woo, and thus treating all of this as a metaphorical truth works best for me.
[1] https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Wheeler%E2%80%93Feynman_absorb...
[2] https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Transactional_interpretation
Re: A growing number of scientists are convinced the future influences the past
#254Earlier quoted context omitted.
Here's the analogy, per Sean Carroll [1]: - There seems to be a special direction "down", where things fall by default, because we live in the vicinity of an influential object in space, called Earth - There seems to be a special direction "forward in time", where things happen by default, because we live in the vicinity of an influential event in time, called Big Bang If we had stuck to the local Earth context and g…
It's difficult to see how such a hypothesis could be tested either experimentally or observationally. Sounds more like metaphysics? Stars shine until they run out of fuel, and the age of a star - the status of its fuel, the buildup of fusion products - happens as time passes. Life on planets taps into the flow of sunlight from the star (and/or the flow of heat and chemical energy from the a hot planetary core) to gen…
I think that one thing to keep in mind is that we are only capable of observing the passage of time along one vector because our perception relies upon entropic biological processes.
We cannot observe in any subset of possible universes where entropy is not present or is working backwards-Ergo those possibilities are wholly out of our direct perception.
That does not mean that causality cannot run in reverse, however, only that we cannot interact with those mechanisms in a way that would preclude our existence or observation.
Re: A growing number of scientists are convinced the future influences the past
#255Earlier quoted context omitted.
yes. it's literally like playing a movie in reverse.
" it's literally like playing a movie in reverse" seems overly authoritative for something we haven't observed. I have seen Tenet, but it's a work of fiction. Have we observed reflected gravitational waves? In reverse-time, where would they originate from if they presumably rippled out into space and didn't collide with anything in forward-time?
.... they would "originate" from all the locations the gravity waves spread to and converge on the source.
Tenet has nothing to do with this- I'm just explaining it as it was covered in my many physics classes that covered the nature of the arrow of time (https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Arrow_of_time) and how I interpret it in terms of what seems most likely/least unlikely.
Re: A growing number of scientists are convinced the future influences the past
#256It's an article about QM. On Vice. About a QM thought experiment. On Vice. Why would there be any expectation of scientific rigor whatsoever? "retrocausality, may seem like science fiction grist at first glance" Stop there, vice.
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Ad_hominem
Technically, Vice isn't a human.
Re: A growing number of scientists are convinced the future influences the past
#257Re: A growing number of scientists are convinced the future influences the past
#258It's articles like this that make me realize why so many less educated people think that science doesn't have rigor, is close to religion, or can't be trusted. Science authors like this do a disservice to science.
Re: A growing number of scientists are convinced the future influences the past
#259Earlier quoted context omitted.
It's difficult to see how such a hypothesis could be tested either experimentally or observationally. Sounds more like metaphysics? Stars shine until they run out of fuel, and the age of a star - the status of its fuel, the buildup of fusion products - happens as time passes. Life on planets taps into the flow of sunlight from the star (and/or the flow of heat and chemical energy from the a hot planetary core) to gen…
I think that the real question is whether the death of the universe by cool down will happen before the arrow of time is reversed. To me it seems more like it will just slow down and then finally stop.
Or if there ever is a "big crunch" where all black holes crunch together to a critical mass, would there be another big bang and time then run backwards?
Re: A growing number of scientists are convinced the future influences the past
#260> 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.
Geocentrism seemed reasonable until it didn't. If time is a true dimension rather than just something we model as a dimension, it's not unreasonable to think that outcomes in the present could be influenced by constraints that exist in the future - if the "universe" function must be valid according to some constraints at all points in the time dimension, "past" states that lead to invalid future states will never occ…
[deleted]