There exists a classical model of the photon after all

http://www.technologyreview.com/view/512281/chinese-physicis...

Physicists are increasingly convinced that time is an emergent property that arises due to low level quantum effects, principally entanglement [1].

The experiment in the Ars Technica article is the equivalent of the universe using lazy evaluation. It's really not so mysterious if you think outside the box of classical physics.

Regarding sending information back in time, from what I've read physicists are divided on the issue. Most agree that sending matter back in time is impossible, but information is still up for debate. In this particular experiment, however, any past observer who measured the information sent back in time would have collapsed the entangled quantum state and prevented the experiment from being conducted successfully. So being able to "successfully" send information back in time doesn't appear too useful if you can't read it.

[1] http://arxiv.org/abs/1310.4691

http://bayes.wustl.edu/etj/articles/cmystery.pdf

>While it is easy to understand and agree with this on the epistemological level, the answer that I and many others would give is that we expect a physical theory to do more than merely predict experimental results in the manner of an empirical equation; we want to come down to Einstein's ontological level and understand what is happening when an atom emits light, when a spin enters a Stern-Gerlach magnet, etc. The Copenhagen theory, having no answer to any question of the form: What is really happening when - - - ?", forbids us to ask such questions and tries to persuade us that it is philosophically naive to want to know what is happening. But I do want to know, and I do not think this is naive; and so for me QM is not a physical theory at all, only an empty mathematical shell in which a future theory may, perhaps, be built.

...and maybe chapter 10 of his book, "Probability Theory: The Logic of Science".

>We are fortunate that the principles of Newtonian mechanics could be developed and verified to great accuracy by studying astronomical phenomena, where friction and turbulence do not complicate what we see. But suppose the Earth were, like Venus, enclosed perpetually in thick clouds. The very existence of an external universe would be unknown for a long time, and to develop the laws of mechanics we would be dependent on the observations we could make locally.

>Since tossing of small objects is nearly the first activity of every child, it would be observed very early that they do not always fall with the same side up, and that all one’s efforts to control the outcome are in vain. The natural hypothesis would be that it is the volition of the object tossed, not the volition of the tosser, that determines the outcome; indeed, that is the hypothesis that small children make when questioned about this. Then it would be a major discovery, once coins had been fabricated, that they tend to show both sides about equally often; and the equality appears to get better as the number of tosses increases. The equality of heads and tails would be seen as a fundamental law of physics; symmetric objects have a symmetric volition in falling.

>With this beginning, we could develop the mathematical theory of object tossing, discovering the binomial distribution, the absence of time correlations, the limit theorems, the combinatorial frequency laws for tossing of several coins at once, the extension to more complicated symmetric objects like dice, etc. All the experimental confirmations of the theory would consist of more and more tossing experiments, measuring the frequencies in more and more elaborate scenarios. From such experiments, nothing would ever be found that called into question the existence of that volition of the object tossed; they only enable one to confirm that volition and measure it more and more accurately...

http://www.med.mcgill.ca/epidemiology/hanley/bios601/Gaussia...