A growing number of scientists are convinced the future influences the past • Hacker News Board

Re: A growing number of scientists are convinced the future influences the past

#271

Post by shkkmo » Fri, Mar 17, 2023, 10:45 PM UTC

mikewarot wrote: post #253

Recently, 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…

You have confused "metaphorical truth" with "heuristic". You can actually verify that a specific gun is not loaded and thus know for certain that not all guns are loaded, this (among several other things) means it really isn't metaphysics at all..

Metaphysics are u

Re: A growing number of scientists are convinced the future influences the past

#272

Post by whatshisface » Fri, Mar 17, 2023, 10:46 PM UTC

ben_w wrote: post #266

whatshisface wrote: post #114

Earlier quoted context omitted.

> Also, geocentrism is actually disproven by numerous observations, which in fact guided the mathematical formulation of our current physics. The validity of a coordinate system with the earth stationary at the center is guaranteed by the general principle of relativity. To get the stars to circle around it you would add a radially increasing potential in classical mechanics, or some coordinate shenanigans in GR. The…

> I know it sounds hard to believe, but if you're willing to bite the bullet that "the center of the universe" has no physical meaning, then earth can't be not the center of the universe any more than it can be. I disagree. The sentence «"the center of the universe" has no physical meaning» requires that Earth can't be at the center of the universe, because there isn't a center for it to be at. You're still allowed a…

It's basically a semantic issue but I don't think the negation of an undefined proposition is true, I think it is undefined. (Thankfully the universe does not run in JavaScript, where !undefined is true.)

Re: A growing number of scientists are convinced the future influences the past

#273

Post by neets » Fri, Mar 17, 2023, 10:46 PM UTC

Sounds like Rupert Sheldrake[1] is finally getting through to people,

1. [A New Science of Life](https://www.sheldrake.org/books-by-rupert-sheldrake/a-new-sc...)

Re: A growing number of scientists are convinced the future influences the past

#274

Post by zone411 » Fri, Mar 17, 2023, 10:47 PM UTC

ashirviskas wrote: post #184

prerok wrote: post #177

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Well, of course not :) Entropy as direction of time just means that the chaos on the whole increases. So, to create an ordered structure, like a cell organism, the by-product is more chaos around it.

To add, life just speeds up the chaos by orders of magnitude, it's a perfect entropy catalyst.

Life reduces local entropy.

Re: A growing number of scientists are convinced the future influences the past

#275

Post by zone411 » Fri, Mar 17, 2023, 10:49 PM UTC

psychphysic wrote: post #181

0xBABAD00C wrote: post #134

Earlier 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…

I don't think Carroll can take credit for the idea of the arrow of time being emergent from a local entropy initial state. Roger Penrose proposed that as far as I know, when Carroll was probably a high schooler.

This idea of time's relation to entropy is pretty iffy. I recommend this book https://news.berkeley.edu/2016/09/20/new-book-links-flow-of-....

Re: A growing number of scientists are convinced the future influences the past

#276

Post by krsdcbl » Fri, Mar 17, 2023, 10:52 PM UTC

richardw wrote: post #223

ChancyChance wrote: post #195

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.

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Ad_hominem

the comment may be superficial and dismissive without pointing out factual issues, but ad hominem attacks are still a very different thing than dismissing the credibility of a publication that has a track record of misleading pop science sensationalism

Re: A growing number of scientists are convinced the future influences the past

#277

Post by DubiousPusher » Fri, Mar 17, 2023, 10:55 PM UTC

K0balt wrote: post #254

photochemsyn wrote: post #164

Earlier 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 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…

But could we observe the effects? Can there be particles which have mass and therefore exhibit gravitation but which are subject to reverse entropy? We would observe these for example as an unexplainable increase in gravitational pull on observable matter without an observable source of that gravitation and without a preceding cause.

Are photons themselves stratling this entropic boundary since they travel at the speed of light and within their own reference frame are not subject to the passage of time?

Re: A growing number of scientists are convinced the future influences the past

#278

Post by mtlmtlmtlmtl » Fri, Mar 17, 2023, 10:56 PM UTC

Why would I want to read about science in Vice, as someone actually interested in physics, but knowledgeable enough to understand a talented science communicator(with a PhD in the field) like Sean Carroll or Rebecca Smethurst.

What purpose does it serve to write sloppy interpretations of complicated, likely to not pan out hypotheses(almost always the case) on quantum mechanics?

So if this doesn't pan out, all they accomplished was that now a bunch of people are walking around with wrong information.

If it does, then we'll find out eventually anyway.

Science journalism is not useful to scientists, not helpful to nerds like me and for the masses it only contributes to misinformation and miseducation.

There are plenty of talented communicators with advanced degrees in their fields that can do this job better, and journalists should go do their jobs which is the opposite of regularly misinforming the public(inb4 cynical reply hurr durr journalists always misinform about everything wing media herp derp. Not interested.)

Re: A growing number of scientists are convinced the future influences the past

#279

Post by DubiousPusher » Fri, Mar 17, 2023, 10:58 PM UTC

SirYandi wrote: post #259

prerok wrote: post #185

Earlier quoted context omitted.

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?

The hypothesis I have encountered is that time would reverse when the expansion of the universe peaked and started to collapse back in on itself. The next big bang would start another run of our universe. I'm guessing the randomness in quantum fluctuations would allow this next run to evolve somewhat differently from the one we are experiencing.

Re: A growing number of scientists are convinced the future influences the past

#280

Post by ben_w » Fri, Mar 17, 2023, 11:02 PM UTC

whatshisface wrote: post #272

ben_w wrote: post #266

Earlier quoted context omitted.

> I know it sounds hard to believe, but if you're willing to bite the bullet that "the center of the universe" has no physical meaning, then earth can't be not the center of the universe any more than it can be. I disagree. The sentence «"the center of the universe" has no physical meaning» requires that Earth can't be at the center of the universe, because there isn't a center for it to be at. You're still allowed a…

It's basically a semantic issue but I don't think the negation of an undefined proposition is true, I think it is undefined. (Thankfully the universe does not run in JavaScript, where !undefined is true.)

That I agree with.

But, Earth.x = 42 (in some arbitrary coordinate space), if I understand correctly there isn't a sub-light coordinate space in this universe where Earth.x = undefined.