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

329 points by myth_drannon 4y ago

mlindner 4y ago
It'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.
garbagecoder 4y ago
I am fascinated by physics but my original background is math. This all seems fascinating but also sort of baroque and far from experiments like much of QM and GR lately.
CatWChainsaw 4y ago
The Wheel of Time turns, and Ages come and pass...
yonaguska 4y ago
Very tangentially related, but we rewrite the past all the time.
- mr90210 4y ago
  Wouldn’t that be a matter of perception and written history rather than the factual past?
  - a_c 4y ago
    Maybe perception IS reality.
    - danjoredd 4y ago
      Thats pretty dangerous thinking though. Adolf Hitler famously said "a lie told often enough eventually becomes the truth" and then used that way of thinking to commit horrible atrocities.
  - karpierz 4y ago
    What is the factual past? It's the extrapolation of models that we've created in the present, but those models are only our best guess at the truth. They may be revised in the future or simply not hold for the past.
    - yjftsjthsd-h 4y ago
      What? No. The factual past is what actually happened. Don't mistake the map for the territory.
      - mistermann 4y ago
        Can you point us to The Territory please? You see it, I presume?
        yjftsjthsd-h 4y ago
        My eyes are a fairly reliable map, but they're still not the territory. That we are only able to perceive reality by proxy doesn't mean that it doesn't exist, though, it just means that we have to get used to using maps, while remembering that they can be flawed.
        mistermann 4y ago
        > My eyes are a fairly reliable map, but they're still not the territory. This seems.....paradoxical...ironic? > That we are only able to perceive reality by proxy doesn't mean that it doesn't exist, though.... True, but potentially misleading/misinformative. > ...it just means that... Are you sure? Are you referring to the territory here, or the map? >...we have to get used to using maps, while remembering that they can be flawed. We've been using maps since the dawn of man, and a lot of people have substantial, abstract knowledge that this is what we're doing....and yet, look at the mess all around us, and the conversations we have about that mess (though: during these conversations, are the participants discussing the map, or the territory: a) in fact? b) in perception?).
    - 4y ago
- sjkoelle 4y ago
  but what is the metric signature???
wisty 4y ago
Human instincts only apply to the systems that they're "evolved" to handle (or the systems we can readily observe and learn from). Think about big systems. The moon is a ginormous rock that's so big it is visible from thousands of km away, but it just hangs in the sky because it's moving so fast it can cheat gravity, but we can barely even see it move. Or think about how a star can somehow explode because it starts running out of fuel (and our sun is just yellow hot - you can do that with a blow torch, but it's powered by a nuclear explosion - I guess it's got quite a bit of surface area?). And little things are even weirder, consider how fast the proteins in your cells bounce around. Then there's quantum - our gut intuition is so out of its comfort zone it's basically meaningless.
- myth_drannon 4y ago
  Right, something along the lines of Donald Hoffman's The Case Against Reality
- dietrichepp 4y ago
  I used to work at camp. You didn’t need to tell kids about fire; they could figure it out. Don’t touch the fire. Flashlights were too complicated. It’s night, a kid turns on their flashlight, points it in their eyes, says “ow” and can’t see where they’re walking until their eyes readjust. Flashlights are beyond our instinctual understanding of how the world works.
  - QuercusMax 4y ago
    Maybe this is just because the kids had prior experience with fire (touch it = ouch), but no experience with flashlights?
    - ocimbote 4y ago
      Yes. If we learned something about fire, it's to teach the youngest ones to stay away from it. Nothing more. An unattended and untaught kid will try it, at least because it's nothing like they've seen before.
  - 4y ago
echelon 4y ago
I just need retrocausal information on the stock market, world events, and any threats to myself or my monopoly on retrocausal information access. That's all.
- mtmickush 4y ago
  If the information is truly retrocausal you won't be able to leverage it to alter the future :'(.
- Rediscover 4y ago
  Perfect response for the subject being discussed -and- your user name -and- a summary of your namesake from of a couple of amazing books by Charles Stross. I applaud You. https://en.m.wikipedia.org/wiki/Singularity_Sky https://en.m.wikipedia.org/wiki/Singularity_Sky
the_gipsy 4y ago
Well, of course, what happens tomorrow dictates what happens today. It's hard to be sure about what happens tomorrow. Then again it's hard to be sure about what happens yesterday. It's not a one-to-one relationship, but there are striking similarities.
strogonoff 4y ago
If only physicists were a bit more curious about philosophy…
- mistermann 4y ago
  It's a good idea, but how could they be, in fact?
  - strogonoff 4y ago
    Why not? What do you mean?
    - mistermann 4y ago
      The complaint (a very valid and important one, imho) is that physicists are ~inadequately curious about philosophy - this is the current state of affairs. To make this no longer be (at some point in the future) the state of affairs, how could it be done (make it "in fact")? "Why not?" seems like a decent first attack to the problem - why are physicists (or, scientists in general) so bad at philosophy? For one, I would nominate the "When you have a powerful hammer, everything looks like a nail" psychological phenomenon, as one plausible part of the puzzle.
      - strogonoff 4y ago
        “Everything looks like a nail” strikes me as an accurate description. Dominance of natural sciences provides this philosophical bias towards physicalistic monism, and physicalism in turn limits how those sciences evolve.
wootland 4y ago
As 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?
- kwhitefoot 4y ago
  The block universe: https://plus.maths.org/content/what-block-time https://plus.maths.org/content/what-block-time
  - Apocryphon 4y ago
    Is it the same thing as the holographic universe theory that was in vogue a couple of decades ago? https://i.pinimg.com/originals/27/d7/8c/27d78c9c3ee93c13eda48fee57b18df0.jpg https://i.pinimg.com/originals/27/d7/8c/27d78c9c3ee93c13eda4...
    - icegreentea2 4y ago
      No. The block universe is that 3+1D spacetime "exists all at once". We just happen to experience travelling through it in one way. Holographic universe is that the physics and information in a 3+1D space time could be encoded into a 2+1D universe (with it's own physics).
      - Apocryphon 4y ago
        Ah, Discover had an issue about that as well https://www.discovermagazine.com/the-sciences/from-here-to-eternity-02 https://www.discovermagazine.com/the-sciences/from-here-to-e... https://i.ebayimg.com/images/g/xH8AAOSwryZi3Ef0/s-l1600.jpg https://i.ebayimg.com/images/g/xH8AAOSwryZi3Ef0/s-l1600.jpg
- theGnuMe 4y ago
  I like this concept. Is there any sci-fi based on this premise?
andrewfromx 4y ago
“It’s important to emphasize at this point in time, whatever that means, that retrocausality is not the same as time travel.” The funny line there is at this point in time. The whole article is about how the future influences the past so… at some point in time retrocauslity will be the same thing?
- lupire 4y ago
  Retrocausality is like time being cooked spaghetti instead of dry. Or even macaroni. The world line is not "parallel" to the time line. Like the One Electon Universe idea ofositrons as time-reversed electrons. The article doesn't define time travel precisely, but presumably they mean discretely jumping ahead or back without passing through interventing moments.
kwhitefoot 4y ago
> In addition to potentially rescuing concepts like locality and realism, retrocausal models also open avenues of exploring a “time-symmetric” view of our universe, in which the laws of physics are the same regardless of whether time runs forward or backward. Usually the fundamental laws are regarded as time symmetric already. What does this mean: > Instead, retrocausal models suggest that there is a mechanism that allows circumstances in the future to correlate with past states. Surely future states inevitably correlate with past states? Perhaps it all makes sense but that article doesn't make a compelling case.
- QuadmasterXLII 4y ago
  We don’t have a time symmetric model of wave function collapse, to my knowledge. If I’m wrong I’d be super curious to read about it
  - throwawaymaths 4y ago
    We don't have a model of wave function collapse at all, iirc.
  - orbifold 4y ago
    Measurements are adjoint to state preparation. Depending on what you measured you can prepare a special state at that time to make the system time reversal symmetric.
  - bioemerl 4y ago
    Wouldn't many worlds be time symmetric?
    - layer8 4y ago
      Yes, but it’s not a model of wave function collapse. Its very premise is that there is no wave function collapse.
  - GoblinSlayer 4y ago
    Just reverse time in the evolution operator.
1970-01-01 4y ago
This idea is present in several Star Trek episodes. The meta question is when did we create those episodes?
- GravitasFailure 4y ago
  I misread your username as a timestamp and was very, very confused for a minute. Very appropriate in this context.
Lucent 4y ago
Another point for my favorite minority quantum mechanics interpretation, two-state vector formalism (TSVF).
- bookofjoe 4y ago
  Where can I read the report?
  - LudwigNagasena 4y ago
    https://arxiv.org/abs/quant-ph/0105101v2 https://arxiv.org/abs/quant-ph/0105101v2
jklinger410 4y ago
Mandela effect moment
m3kw9 4y ago
Maybe in a microscopic way like at quantum level
- hummus_bae 4y ago
  [dead]
okasaki 4y ago
Isn't it just a matter of perspective/terminology? If in my physics theory I redefine that past=future and future=past then I have a physics theory where the future influences the past, and very strongly so.
creeble 4y ago
while I might buy that the past is strongly influenced by the present (“facts” change over time), I don’t think we have much of a model for the future to say much of anything about how it influences the past. Or, I guess the point is, maybe it’s the same thing.
marcus_holmes 4y ago
Interesting 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?
- paulusthe 4y ago
  That's a very lazy school of thought though. It's just atheistic Calvinism, a tautology masquerading as a "philosophy". Calvin believed in pre-destination (your fate and every decision you make is decided before you exist) on the grounds that, because God exists and is omnipotent, what you are doing must therefore be what God wants to happen, both good and bad. After all, God is omnipotent, so there you go. Today's Calvinists just replace God-driven destiny with nature-driven destiny, but the underlying tautology (X exists, therefore X was always destined to exist, as proven by the fact that it exists at all) remains the same. In fact, it's an arguably more ignorant version of Calvinism, because it requires that one completely dismisses any knowledge they have of probability theory. So it's the "smarter" Calvinism that requires you be ignorant of 20th century mathematical advances. Hate that crap. The only people I hear talking about it are silicon valley utopians, which is probably the other reason I hate it.
  - flanked-evergl 4y ago
    > In fact, it's an arguably more ignorant version of Calvinism, because it requires that one completely dismisses any knowledge they have of probability theory No to pick too many nits, but I think it is well established that knowledge of formal sciences (i.e. mathematics) does not impart knowledge about natural sciences (i.e. physics). While maths a useful tool, there are no established rules of inference for reality, and without rules of inference you can't really make claims on infinite sets. Natural sciences allow us to find mathematical constructs that make good predictions within specific constraints or that have not yet been falsified, just because something is true in probability theory does not make it true in reality.
  - anotherman554 4y ago
    If humans lacked free will, probability would still be useful, because humans use it when they have imperfect information about an upcoming event.
gfd 4y ago
I 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".
- Red_Leaves_Flyy 4y ago
  What changed?
  - carlmr 4y ago
    That's still lazy loading, he hasn't looked into it yet.
- KwisatzHaderack 4y ago
  I feel like this assumes solipsism.
  - Spivak 4y ago
    Multiplayer solipsism. That part of the game doesn't load until at least one player observes it.
- orbz 4y ago
  Wave function collapse in effect?
- sdwr 4y ago
  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 compressing "now" so there's more space for something else later. I'd be willing to believe that everyone has a god-given amount of universe rendering time that can be allocated in different ways, and that other people's attention stacks with it in a complex, layered way.
pif 4y ago
> A growing number of scientists... Beware, getting from one to two is already a growing number!
- taskforcegemini 4y ago
  that's actually a big jump, 100% increase
  - lupire 4y ago
    It's growing exponentially, perhaps even factorially.
ibn_khaldun 4y ago
The 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…
- q845712 4y 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.
prof-dr-ir 4y ago
For this community it might be useful to stress that the vast majority of practicing theoretical physicists is not in the least worried about any interpretation of quantum mechanics. I would argue that the idea instead is to try to make predictions for future experiments. In the case of quantum gravity, especially string theory, these might be thought experiments (what happens if you fall into a black hole), technically infeasible experiments (what would a particle accelerator with the size of the solar system produce), or even completely hypothetical (what if the universe would have eleven macroscopic dimensions) but that does not change the underlying mindset. When it comes to the interpretation of quantum mechanics there is just nothing left to explain. There is no experiment that decides between different interpretations, so that is it as far as most physicists are concerned. The ideas in the linked article suffer from the same fate: there does not seem to be even a hypothetical way to test them, and the topic is therefore considered one of philosophy more than physics.
- eternauta3k 4y ago
  Still, can't alternative formulations inspire new physics? Like Lagrangian/Hamiltonian formulations of classical mechanics making the step towards QM easier?
peter_d_sherman 4y ago
>"But what if this forward causality could somehow be reversed in time, allowing actions in the future to influence outcomes in the past? This mind-bending idea, known as retrocausality, may seem like science fiction grist at first glance, but it is starting to gain real traction among physicists and philosophers, among other researchers, as a possible solution to some of the most intractable riddles underlying our reality." Linguistics: retrocausality -- is going into my 2023 lexicon...
a_subsystem 4y ago
Well... yes. http://gurdjiefffourthway.org/pdf/GURDJIEFF%20AND%20TIME.pdf http://gurdjiefffourthway.org/pdf/GURDJIEFF%20AND%20TIME.pdf
ardit33 4y ago
"Manifesting" -- maybe those girls that are into it, are right ;)
- dsego 4y ago
  World-line travel my friend https://metallicman.com/detailed-breakdown-of-consciousness-migration-in-the-mwi/ https://metallicman.com/detailed-breakdown-of-consciousness-...
jonny_eh 4y ago
> 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.
- whatshisface 4y ago
  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-orbiting+precessing+... coordinate system.
  - nanidin 4y ago
    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.
    - entropicdrifter 4y ago
      Gravity is a universal constant. If you reverse time, you just reverse the order of cause and effect, not what the effect is. Does that make more sense to you?
      - nanidin 4y ago
        If we reverse time, would gravitational waves flow backwards?
        dekhn 4y ago
        yes. it's literally like playing a movie in reverse.
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raydiatian 4y ago
A growing number of people are recognizing that this article was published in VICE, which isn’t exactly a reputable STEM magazine, as punctuated by the fact that the article refers to theoretical physicists as “people” or “scientists”. You gotta think about the (stoner) audience this article was written for, I wouldn’t take too much stock in its conclusions.
karmakaze 4y ago
It does make explaining some things much easier, like the "Delayed-choice Quantum Eraser"[0] experiment. Basically what's possible next is anything that can solve for conditions set by the past, and some from the future. [0] https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Delayed-choice_quantum_eraser https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Delayed-choice_quantum_eraser
- tetris11 4y ago
  I think it relates more to Wheeler's Anthropic Participatory Principle[0], where multiple observers of some event in the past, can influence it from the future. 0: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/John_Archibald_Wheeler https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/John_Archibald_Wheeler
isoprophlex 4y ago
Cool theory... A bit too Asimov for me though https://en.m.wikipedia.org/wiki/Thiotimoline https://en.m.wikipedia.org/wiki/Thiotimoline
macrolime 4y ago
I asked ChatGPT if it has any technological applications. No ideas if its just bullshitting Retrocausality, or the idea that events in the future can influence events in the past, is a concept that challenges our conventional understanding of time and causality. Although it is an intriguing concept that arises in some interpretations of quantum mechanics, it is important to note that there is currently no experimental evidence supporting retrocausality. As a result, it is difficult to predict how retrocausality could be influenced or used in technology, since we have no concrete examples of retrocausality occurring in the physical world. However, we can speculate on how such technology might work if retrocausality were indeed possible. Communication: If retrocausality were real, it could potentially be harnessed for faster-than-light communication or even communication with the past. Such technology might allow us to send messages or information backward in time, which could have a significant impact on how we understand and interact with our own history. Computing: Retrocausal computing could theoretically be used to perform complex calculations more efficiently by taking advantage of future outcomes or solutions to influence the computational process in the past. Energy production: If retrocausality could be controlled, it might be possible to harness energy from future states of a system and use it to power devices or processes in the past. However, it is important to reiterate that these applications are purely speculative and based on the assumption that retrocausality is a real phenomenon. Until there is experimental evidence supporting retrocausality or a more comprehensive understanding of how it might work, it is unlikely that we will see any practical technologies utilizing this concept.
excalibur 4y ago
> “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.
- mjhay 4y ago
  I'm guessing it's in terms of quantum information. Quantum entanglement and tunneling can happen faster than the speed of light, which causes similar time paradoxes with special relativity. This is avoided by the impossibility of sending observable classical information. Two entangled objects can affect each other, but you can't get actual information about it, because it is destroyed upon observation.
sophacles 4y ago
So it goes.
huetius 4y ago
Would this put concepts from classical philosophy like formal and final causation back on the table? The article seems to imply that it’s possible, but I’ve learned that journalistic summaries can be low-fidelity.
narrator 4y ago
The Transactional Interpretation of Quantum Mechanics also says this[1]. Retrocausality and non-locality are why a lot of physicists don't like it. It's just an interpretation too, but is otherwise consistent with all other QM theories. [1]https://en.m.wikipedia.org/wiki/Transactional_interpretation https://en.m.wikipedia.org/wiki/Transactional_interpretation
zoogeny 4y ago
The final episode of Star Trek: The Next Generation played with this concept [1]. 1. https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/All_Good_Things..._(Star_Trek:_The_Next_Generation) https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/All_Good_Things..._(Star_Trek:...
kevin_thibedeau 4y ago
This would perfectly explain deja vu.
gatane 4y ago
When you flip that dx/dt so it becomes dt/dx...
SMAAART 4y ago
Alfred Adler would agree with retrocausality.
richardw 4y ago
Honestly it’s been staring us in the face for 100 years. Light doesn’t experience time. We’ve known this for so long. Light is created and destroyed in the same instant - across billions of light years it happens instantly. For that to be true, what else must be true? Must. There is no photon. There is just a wave. The interaction probably (definitely?) depends on features of both the emitting electron and absorbing electron. There is either retrocausality or superdeterminism (or both). We don’t know which. Right now that’s not important but scientific fashion has been refusing to get this one thing. We’ll learn so much once we move past this. Light going into a black hole? Research paper.
- lupire 4y ago
  I don't think there are any logical arguments against superdeterminism, except spirituality. Even non-super determinism and Penrose quantum consciousness just pushes the superdeterminism into a unobservable metaphysical corner.
dools 4y ago
Spooky action at an instance
ford 4y ago
There'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)
- smrtinsert 4y ago
  Phenomenal film. Full of interesting ideas and heartache. Pairs well with Annihilation.
- deleted 4y ago
  [deleted]
gexaha 4y ago
In philosophy this idea is called "hyperstition"
pharmakom 4y ago
Intuitively… we can’t even do science without a notion of time that advances. How can we make observations without there being a concept of “something happened previously”? I think this is embedded in science itself.
ChancyChance 4y ago
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.
- richardw 4y ago
  https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Ad_hominem https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Ad_hominem
  - nanidin 4y ago
    [dead]
  - mlindner 4y ago
    Technically, Vice isn't a human.
    - m463 4y ago
      hmm... Vice might be incorporated.
      - baremetal 4y ago
        Corporations are people too https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Corporate_personhood https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Corporate_personhood
        eldritch_4ier 4y ago
        Ugh this point is so old. Corporations have “legal personhood”, which shares almost nothing in common with actually being a person in the understood sense. It’s just a legal term, in the same way a state of matter and a state in the US have nothing in common except the same letters make up the term.
stkdump 4y ago
If time were symmetric, wouldn't that mean instead of causality (future is influenced by the past) and retrocausality (past is influenced by the future), there is no preference and in effect no causality at all? A&B are necessarily connected, but none of them is the cause of the other.
- CuriouslyC 4y ago
  If you think of it as a series of states with some prior probability, and jumps from state to state also have some probability, it isn't so much causal as correlated. If time is a true dimension and reality is the most probable universe when integrated over all of time, improbable states and transitions might occur in the "past" in order to enable high probability states and transitions in the future.
bartimus 4y ago
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.
kazinator 4y ago
The 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.
alphanumeric0 4y ago
I'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.
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nathias 4y ago
on the quantum level sure, but on the macro level it's just idealism
electrondood 4y ago
I have also come to this conclusion. I have had experiences that cannot possibly be explained unless at least some future events already exist. This also explained the "probabilistic" nature of quantum behaviors; it's only probabilistic to us because we are unaware of the influence of future events. I now believe it's extremely likely that the universe is superdetermined, and I gave up the idea of actual free will long ago. Highly recommend "Time Loops" by Eric Wargo.
- acyou 4y ago
  Could you please expand on the experiences that you have had, that can't be explained without future events already existing?
- contravariant 4y ago
  Superdeterminism is a cop-out where the universe is simultaneously the only existing one and the most common possible one, for no obvious reason. But yeah we'd like to think there's just one past and multiple different futures, but the fact that the laws of physics are time-reversible kind of makes it unlikely for both to be true.
- mock-possum 4y ago
  > I have had experiences that cannot possibly be explained unless at least some future events already exist you can't just drop something like this and then walk away without telling the rest of the story
plebianRube 4y ago
I try to tell my 'past' self events that have occurred. I also try to listen to any future 'self' notifications. It's mostly a fun thought experiment.
acyou 4y ago
The idea that there are "causes" and that there are "effects", and that these are separate and distinct, is in some way on a parallel with the idea that the past influences the future, and vice versa. If we think that the past influences the future, then it's just as reasonable to think that the future influences the past. Personally, I view "causes" and "effects" as abstractions that we use to help interpret our complicated world, nothing more. That's not to say that it's not legitimate to talk about causes and effects and to reason using them, but when seriously considered, anything that absolutely looks like definitely a cause or an effect, needs to be considered again with the system boundaries re-drawn, that is to say, with the system boundaries drawn around the whole universe. Take for example the cigarette lighting the forest on fire. Saying that the cigarette caused the fire is as much of a value judgement and political statement as saying that the decades-long drought caused the fire, or that humans causing global warming caused the fire, or that the cigarette companies caused the fire, or that God caused the fire. The emotional response that each of these statements elicits in various people should tell you that any statement linking cause and effect is emotional and political at its core. This reflects the nature of the humans that create these statements. We have a built-in tendency to try to assign causes to events and effects. We should zoom out enough to understand that this is part of our humanity, not part of the way that the universe works.
mikewarot 4y ago
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 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_absorber_theory https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Wheeler%E2%80%93Feynman_absorb... [2] https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Transactional_interpretation https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Transactional_interpretation [3] https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Afshar_experiment https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Afshar_experiment
- didericis 4y ago
  This comment will probably give you hives, but the inability to interpret things like QM literally and the inability of the left brain to process things holistically seems relevant to the interpretability problem. See Iain McGilchrist's "The Matter with Things". (I promise it's less woo-woo than it appears)
  - mikewarot 4y ago
    I started watching an interview with McGilchrist about the work in question, there was no physics, just a boatload of philosophy. It turns out I don't need physics to be interpretable, just a workable predictive tool.
    - didericis 4y ago
      Fair enough. According to his thesis, the metaphysics/philosophy aspect of this stuff is in a right hemisphere bucket. While there may be reason to meditate on that if you’re a researcher wanting to gain better intuition, if you want to use physics as a tool, the aspects useful to the left hemisphere are all you need/the thesis is irrelevant.
neets 4y ago
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-science-of-life-morphic-resonance https://www.sheldrake.org/books-by-rupert-sheldrake/a-new-sc...)
mtlmtlmtlmtl 4y ago
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 <direction> wing media herp derp. Not interested.)
49erfangoniners 4y ago
Thanks Vice
strohwueste 4y ago
A very common thought in speculative Design. Eben if it is a bit true event in the future, an imagined event can change the present as the perception of the past. See utopias and dystopia as example. If we say this known known in the future it already affected the present and also the past. It gets interesting for the unknowns unknowns if those will change the past and present. But already accepting that there unknown unknowns changes the present.
hislaziness 4y ago
Where can I read a more scientific treatment of this topic?
quantum_state 4y ago
IMHO, it’s not even wrong … let’s not waste time on it.
arcastroe 4y ago
To anyone knowledgable. Are theories of retrocausality also related to: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/One-electron_universe https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/One-electron_universe ?
omazurov 4y ago
>...retrocausal models also open avenues of exploring a “time-symmetric” view of our universe, in which the laws of physics are the same regardless of whether time runs forward or backward. ... or sideways! If you want a visual model that may help to build some intuition about that, I have one at [1]. Retrocausality is not explicitly spelled out in that model but "it's uh... uh... it's down there somewhere". [1] https://github.com/OlegMazurov/Janus https://github.com/OlegMazurov/Janus
Operative0198 4y ago
A growing number of scientists recently watched 'Tenet'.
Haga 4y ago
[dead]
thenoblesunfish 4y ago
So what? I'm assuming that some people have some models of physics based on equations, and those don't happen to be of the kind where the state for some t <= T determines the state for t > T. Ok, great - does that predict or explain or simplify anything interesting about the observable universe?
fuzzfactor 4y ago
>A growing number of scientists are convinced the future influences the past A growing number of people in general are becoming more superstitious, and more easily convinced of even more incredible occurrences.
neodymiumphish 4y ago
Asimov's The Last Question is all I can think of. https://en.m.wikipedia.org/wiki/The_Last_Question https://en.m.wikipedia.org/wiki/The_Last_Question
euroderf 4y ago
Been kinda wonderin'bout this. Human memory is a chemical process driven by entropy ("more or less"?), making it one-way(?), so retrocausal info wouldn't be accessed via any mechanism associated with stored memory.
euroderf 4y ago
Cause-precedes-effect, meet retrocausality. FTL FTW! Oops a new science fiction trope.
naveen99 4y ago
The past is not so much more knowable than the future. the future is about as predictable as the past is knowable.
cuteboy19 4y ago
I'd rather read backreaction. These articles always handwave all the actual relevant stuff and give poor pop sci analogies that aren't helpful or accurate

329 points by myth_drannon 4y ago

It'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.

garbagecoder 4y ago

I am fascinated by physics but my original background is math. This all seems fascinating but also sort of baroque and far from experiments like much of QM and GR lately.

CatWChainsaw 4y ago

The Wheel of Time turns, and Ages come and pass...

yonaguska 4y ago

Very tangentially related, but we rewrite the past all the time.

mr90210 4y ago
Wouldn’t that be a matter of perception and written history rather than the factual past?
- a_c 4y ago
  Maybe perception IS reality.
  - danjoredd 4y ago
    Thats pretty dangerous thinking though. Adolf Hitler famously said "a lie told often enough eventually becomes the truth" and then used that way of thinking to commit horrible atrocities.
- karpierz 4y ago
  What is the factual past? It's the extrapolation of models that we've created in the present, but those models are only our best guess at the truth. They may be revised in the future or simply not hold for the past.
  - yjftsjthsd-h 4y ago
    What? No. The factual past is what actually happened. Don't mistake the map for the territory.
    - mistermann 4y ago
      Can you point us to The Territory please? You see it, I presume?
      - yjftsjthsd-h 4y ago
        My eyes are a fairly reliable map, but they're still not the territory. That we are only able to perceive reality by proxy doesn't mean that it doesn't exist, though, it just means that we have to get used to using maps, while remembering that they can be flawed.
        mistermann 4y ago
        > My eyes are a fairly reliable map, but they're still not the territory. This seems.....paradoxical...ironic? > That we are only able to perceive reality by proxy doesn't mean that it doesn't exist, though.... True, but potentially misleading/misinformative. > ...it just means that... Are you sure? Are you referring to the territory here, or the map? >...we have to get used to using maps, while remembering that they can be flawed. We've been using maps since the dawn of man, and a lot of people have substantial, abstract knowledge that this is what we're doing....and yet, look at the mess all around us, and the conversations we have about that mess (though: during these conversations, are the participants discussing the map, or the territory: a) in fact? b) in perception?).
  - 4y ago
sjkoelle 4y ago
but what is the metric signature???

wisty 4y ago

Human instincts only apply to the systems that they're "evolved" to handle (or the systems we can readily observe and learn from). Think about big systems. The moon is a ginormous rock that's so big it is visible from thousands of km away, but it just hangs in the sky because it's moving so fast it can cheat gravity, but we can barely even see it move. Or think about how a star can somehow explode because it starts running out of fuel (and our sun is just yellow hot - you can do that with a blow torch, but it's powered by a nuclear explosion - I guess it's got quite a bit of surface area?). And little things are even weirder, consider how fast the proteins in your cells bounce around. Then there's quantum - our gut intuition is so out of its comfort zone it's basically meaningless.

myth_drannon 4y ago
Right, something along the lines of Donald Hoffman's The Case Against Reality
dietrichepp 4y ago
I used to work at camp. You didn’t need to tell kids about fire; they could figure it out. Don’t touch the fire. Flashlights were too complicated. It’s night, a kid turns on their flashlight, points it in their eyes, says “ow” and can’t see where they’re walking until their eyes readjust. Flashlights are beyond our instinctual understanding of how the world works.
- QuercusMax 4y ago
  Maybe this is just because the kids had prior experience with fire (touch it = ouch), but no experience with flashlights?
  - ocimbote 4y ago
    Yes. If we learned something about fire, it's to teach the youngest ones to stay away from it. Nothing more. An unattended and untaught kid will try it, at least because it's nothing like they've seen before.
- 4y ago

echelon 4y ago

I just need retrocausal information on the stock market, world events, and any threats to myself or my monopoly on retrocausal information access. That's all.

mtmickush 4y ago
If the information is truly retrocausal you won't be able to leverage it to alter the future :'(.
Rediscover 4y ago
Perfect response for the subject being discussed -and- your user name -and- a summary of your namesake from of a couple of amazing books by Charles Stross. I applaud You. https://en.m.wikipedia.org/wiki/Singularity_Sky https://en.m.wikipedia.org/wiki/Singularity_Sky

the_gipsy 4y ago

Well, of course, what happens tomorrow dictates what happens today. It's hard to be sure about what happens tomorrow. Then again it's hard to be sure about what happens yesterday. It's not a one-to-one relationship, but there are striking similarities.

strogonoff 4y ago

If only physicists were a bit more curious about philosophy…

mistermann 4y ago
It's a good idea, but how could they be, in fact?
- strogonoff 4y ago
  Why not? What do you mean?
  - mistermann 4y ago
    The complaint (a very valid and important one, imho) is that physicists are ~inadequately curious about philosophy - this is the current state of affairs. To make this no longer be (at some point in the future) the state of affairs, how could it be done (make it "in fact")? "Why not?" seems like a decent first attack to the problem - why are physicists (or, scientists in general) so bad at philosophy? For one, I would nominate the "When you have a powerful hammer, everything looks like a nail" psychological phenomenon, as one plausible part of the puzzle.
    - strogonoff 4y ago
      “Everything looks like a nail” strikes me as an accurate description. Dominance of natural sciences provides this philosophical bias towards physicalistic monism, and physicalism in turn limits how those sciences evolve.

wootland 4y ago

As 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?

kwhitefoot 4y ago
The block universe: https://plus.maths.org/content/what-block-time https://plus.maths.org/content/what-block-time
- Apocryphon 4y ago
  Is it the same thing as the holographic universe theory that was in vogue a couple of decades ago? https://i.pinimg.com/originals/27/d7/8c/27d78c9c3ee93c13eda48fee57b18df0.jpg https://i.pinimg.com/originals/27/d7/8c/27d78c9c3ee93c13eda4...
  - icegreentea2 4y ago
    No. The block universe is that 3+1D spacetime "exists all at once". We just happen to experience travelling through it in one way. Holographic universe is that the physics and information in a 3+1D space time could be encoded into a 2+1D universe (with it's own physics).
    - Apocryphon 4y ago
      Ah, Discover had an issue about that as well https://www.discovermagazine.com/the-sciences/from-here-to-eternity-02 https://www.discovermagazine.com/the-sciences/from-here-to-e... https://i.ebayimg.com/images/g/xH8AAOSwryZi3Ef0/s-l1600.jpg https://i.ebayimg.com/images/g/xH8AAOSwryZi3Ef0/s-l1600.jpg
theGnuMe 4y ago
I like this concept. Is there any sci-fi based on this premise?

andrewfromx 4y ago

“It’s important to emphasize at this point in time, whatever that means, that retrocausality is not the same as time travel.” The funny line there is at this point in time. The whole article is about how the future influences the past so… at some point in time retrocauslity will be the same thing?

lupire 4y ago
Retrocausality is like time being cooked spaghetti instead of dry. Or even macaroni. The world line is not "parallel" to the time line. Like the One Electon Universe idea ofositrons as time-reversed electrons. The article doesn't define time travel precisely, but presumably they mean discretely jumping ahead or back without passing through interventing moments.

kwhitefoot 4y ago

> In addition to potentially rescuing concepts like locality and realism, retrocausal models also open avenues of exploring a “time-symmetric” view of our universe, in which the laws of physics are the same regardless of whether time runs forward or backward. Usually the fundamental laws are regarded as time symmetric already. What does this mean: > Instead, retrocausal models suggest that there is a mechanism that allows circumstances in the future to correlate with past states. Surely future states inevitably correlate with past states? Perhaps it all makes sense but that article doesn't make a compelling case.

QuadmasterXLII 4y ago
We don’t have a time symmetric model of wave function collapse, to my knowledge. If I’m wrong I’d be super curious to read about it
- throwawaymaths 4y ago
  We don't have a model of wave function collapse at all, iirc.
- orbifold 4y ago
  Measurements are adjoint to state preparation. Depending on what you measured you can prepare a special state at that time to make the system time reversal symmetric.
- bioemerl 4y ago
  Wouldn't many worlds be time symmetric?
  - layer8 4y ago
    Yes, but it’s not a model of wave function collapse. Its very premise is that there is no wave function collapse.
- GoblinSlayer 4y ago
  Just reverse time in the evolution operator.

1970-01-01 4y ago

This idea is present in several Star Trek episodes. The meta question is when did we create those episodes?

GravitasFailure 4y ago
I misread your username as a timestamp and was very, very confused for a minute. Very appropriate in this context.

Lucent 4y ago

Another point for my favorite minority quantum mechanics interpretation, two-state vector formalism (TSVF).

bookofjoe 4y ago
Where can I read the report?
- LudwigNagasena 4y ago
  https://arxiv.org/abs/quant-ph/0105101v2 https://arxiv.org/abs/quant-ph/0105101v2

jklinger410 4y ago

Mandela effect moment

m3kw9 4y ago

Maybe in a microscopic way like at quantum level

hummus_bae 4y ago
[dead]

okasaki 4y ago

Isn't it just a matter of perspective/terminology? If in my physics theory I redefine that past=future and future=past then I have a physics theory where the future influences the past, and very strongly so.

creeble 4y ago

while I might buy that the past is strongly influenced by the present (“facts” change over time), I don’t think we have much of a model for the future to say much of anything about how it influences the past. Or, I guess the point is, maybe it’s the same thing.

marcus_holmes 4y ago

Interesting 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?

paulusthe 4y ago
That's a very lazy school of thought though. It's just atheistic Calvinism, a tautology masquerading as a "philosophy". Calvin believed in pre-destination (your fate and every decision you make is decided before you exist) on the grounds that, because God exists and is omnipotent, what you are doing must therefore be what God wants to happen, both good and bad. After all, God is omnipotent, so there you go. Today's Calvinists just replace God-driven destiny with nature-driven destiny, but the underlying tautology (X exists, therefore X was always destined to exist, as proven by the fact that it exists at all) remains the same. In fact, it's an arguably more ignorant version of Calvinism, because it requires that one completely dismisses any knowledge they have of probability theory. So it's the "smarter" Calvinism that requires you be ignorant of 20th century mathematical advances. Hate that crap. The only people I hear talking about it are silicon valley utopians, which is probably the other reason I hate it.
- flanked-evergl 4y ago
  > In fact, it's an arguably more ignorant version of Calvinism, because it requires that one completely dismisses any knowledge they have of probability theory No to pick too many nits, but I think it is well established that knowledge of formal sciences (i.e. mathematics) does not impart knowledge about natural sciences (i.e. physics). While maths a useful tool, there are no established rules of inference for reality, and without rules of inference you can't really make claims on infinite sets. Natural sciences allow us to find mathematical constructs that make good predictions within specific constraints or that have not yet been falsified, just because something is true in probability theory does not make it true in reality.
- anotherman554 4y ago
  If humans lacked free will, probability would still be useful, because humans use it when they have imperfect information about an upcoming event.

gfd 4y ago

I 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".

Red_Leaves_Flyy 4y ago
What changed?
- carlmr 4y ago
  That's still lazy loading, he hasn't looked into it yet.
KwisatzHaderack 4y ago
I feel like this assumes solipsism.
- Spivak 4y ago
  Multiplayer solipsism. That part of the game doesn't load until at least one player observes it.
orbz 4y ago
Wave function collapse in effect?
sdwr 4y ago
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 compressing "now" so there's more space for something else later. I'd be willing to believe that everyone has a god-given amount of universe rendering time that can be allocated in different ways, and that other people's attention stacks with it in a complex, layered way.

pif 4y ago

> A growing number of scientists... Beware, getting from one to two is already a growing number!

taskforcegemini 4y ago
that's actually a big jump, 100% increase
- lupire 4y ago
  It's growing exponentially, perhaps even factorially.

ibn_khaldun 4y ago

The 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…

q845712 4y 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.

prof-dr-ir 4y ago

For this community it might be useful to stress that the vast majority of practicing theoretical physicists is not in the least worried about any interpretation of quantum mechanics. I would argue that the idea instead is to try to make predictions for future experiments. In the case of quantum gravity, especially string theory, these might be thought experiments (what happens if you fall into a black hole), technically infeasible experiments (what would a particle accelerator with the size of the solar system produce), or even completely hypothetical (what if the universe would have eleven macroscopic dimensions) but that does not change the underlying mindset. When it comes to the interpretation of quantum mechanics there is just nothing left to explain. There is no experiment that decides between different interpretations, so that is it as far as most physicists are concerned. The ideas in the linked article suffer from the same fate: there does not seem to be even a hypothetical way to test them, and the topic is therefore considered one of philosophy more than physics.

eternauta3k 4y ago
Still, can't alternative formulations inspire new physics? Like Lagrangian/Hamiltonian formulations of classical mechanics making the step towards QM easier?

peter_d_sherman 4y ago

>"But what if this forward causality could somehow be reversed in time, allowing actions in the future to influence outcomes in the past? This mind-bending idea, known as retrocausality, may seem like science fiction grist at first glance, but it is starting to gain real traction among physicists and philosophers, among other researchers, as a possible solution to some of the most intractable riddles underlying our reality." Linguistics: retrocausality -- is going into my 2023 lexicon...

a_subsystem 4y ago

Well... yes. http://gurdjiefffourthway.org/pdf/GURDJIEFF%20AND%20TIME.pdf http://gurdjiefffourthway.org/pdf/GURDJIEFF%20AND%20TIME.pdf

ardit33 4y ago

"Manifesting" -- maybe those girls that are into it, are right ;)

dsego 4y ago
World-line travel my friend https://metallicman.com/detailed-breakdown-of-consciousness-migration-in-the-mwi/ https://metallicman.com/detailed-breakdown-of-consciousness-...

jonny_eh 4y ago

> 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.

whatshisface 4y ago
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-orbiting+precessing+... coordinate system.
- nanidin 4y ago
  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.
  - entropicdrifter 4y ago
    Gravity is a universal constant. If you reverse time, you just reverse the order of cause and effect, not what the effect is. Does that make more sense to you?
    - nanidin 4y ago
      If we reverse time, would gravitational waves flow backwards?
      - dekhn 4y ago
        yes. it's literally like playing a movie in reverse.

deleted 4y ago

[deleted]

raydiatian 4y ago

A growing number of people are recognizing that this article was published in VICE, which isn’t exactly a reputable STEM magazine, as punctuated by the fact that the article refers to theoretical physicists as “people” or “scientists”. You gotta think about the (stoner) audience this article was written for, I wouldn’t take too much stock in its conclusions.

karmakaze 4y ago

It does make explaining some things much easier, like the "Delayed-choice Quantum Eraser"[0] experiment. Basically what's possible next is anything that can solve for conditions set by the past, and some from the future. [0] https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Delayed-choice_quantum_eraser https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Delayed-choice_quantum_eraser

tetris11 4y ago
I think it relates more to Wheeler's Anthropic Participatory Principle[0], where multiple observers of some event in the past, can influence it from the future. 0: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/John_Archibald_Wheeler https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/John_Archibald_Wheeler

isoprophlex 4y ago

Cool theory... A bit too Asimov for me though https://en.m.wikipedia.org/wiki/Thiotimoline https://en.m.wikipedia.org/wiki/Thiotimoline

macrolime 4y ago

I asked ChatGPT if it has any technological applications. No ideas if its just bullshitting Retrocausality, or the idea that events in the future can influence events in the past, is a concept that challenges our conventional understanding of time and causality. Although it is an intriguing concept that arises in some interpretations of quantum mechanics, it is important to note that there is currently no experimental evidence supporting retrocausality. As a result, it is difficult to predict how retrocausality could be influenced or used in technology, since we have no concrete examples of retrocausality occurring in the physical world. However, we can speculate on how such technology might work if retrocausality were indeed possible. Communication: If retrocausality were real, it could potentially be harnessed for faster-than-light communication or even communication with the past. Such technology might allow us to send messages or information backward in time, which could have a significant impact on how we understand and interact with our own history. Computing: Retrocausal computing could theoretically be used to perform complex calculations more efficiently by taking advantage of future outcomes or solutions to influence the computational process in the past. Energy production: If retrocausality could be controlled, it might be possible to harness energy from future states of a system and use it to power devices or processes in the past. However, it is important to reiterate that these applications are purely speculative and based on the assumption that retrocausality is a real phenomenon. Until there is experimental evidence supporting retrocausality or a more comprehensive understanding of how it might work, it is unlikely that we will see any practical technologies utilizing this concept.

excalibur 4y ago

> “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.

mjhay 4y ago
I'm guessing it's in terms of quantum information. Quantum entanglement and tunneling can happen faster than the speed of light, which causes similar time paradoxes with special relativity. This is avoided by the impossibility of sending observable classical information. Two entangled objects can affect each other, but you can't get actual information about it, because it is destroyed upon observation.

sophacles 4y ago

So it goes.

huetius 4y ago

Would this put concepts from classical philosophy like formal and final causation back on the table? The article seems to imply that it’s possible, but I’ve learned that journalistic summaries can be low-fidelity.

narrator 4y ago

The Transactional Interpretation of Quantum Mechanics also says this[1]. Retrocausality and non-locality are why a lot of physicists don't like it. It's just an interpretation too, but is otherwise consistent with all other QM theories. [1]https://en.m.wikipedia.org/wiki/Transactional_interpretation https://en.m.wikipedia.org/wiki/Transactional_interpretation

zoogeny 4y ago

The final episode of Star Trek: The Next Generation played with this concept [1]. 1. https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/All_Good_Things..._(Star_Trek:_The_Next_Generation) https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/All_Good_Things..._(Star_Trek:...

kevin_thibedeau 4y ago

This would perfectly explain deja vu.

gatane 4y ago

When you flip that dx/dt so it becomes dt/dx...

SMAAART 4y ago

Alfred Adler would agree with retrocausality.

richardw 4y ago

Honestly it’s been staring us in the face for 100 years. Light doesn’t experience time. We’ve known this for so long. Light is created and destroyed in the same instant - across billions of light years it happens instantly. For that to be true, what else must be true? Must. There is no photon. There is just a wave. The interaction probably (definitely?) depends on features of both the emitting electron and absorbing electron. There is either retrocausality or superdeterminism (or both). We don’t know which. Right now that’s not important but scientific fashion has been refusing to get this one thing. We’ll learn so much once we move past this. Light going into a black hole? Research paper.

lupire 4y ago
I don't think there are any logical arguments against superdeterminism, except spirituality. Even non-super determinism and Penrose quantum consciousness just pushes the superdeterminism into a unobservable metaphysical corner.

dools 4y ago

Spooky action at an instance

ford 4y ago

There'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)

smrtinsert 4y ago
Phenomenal film. Full of interesting ideas and heartache. Pairs well with Annihilation.
deleted 4y ago
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gexaha 4y ago

In philosophy this idea is called "hyperstition"

pharmakom 4y ago

Intuitively… we can’t even do science without a notion of time that advances. How can we make observations without there being a concept of “something happened previously”? I think this is embedded in science itself.

ChancyChance 4y ago

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.

richardw 4y ago
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Ad_hominem https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Ad_hominem
- nanidin 4y ago
  [dead]
- mlindner 4y ago
  Technically, Vice isn't a human.
  - m463 4y ago
    hmm... Vice might be incorporated.
    - baremetal 4y ago
      Corporations are people too https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Corporate_personhood https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Corporate_personhood
      - eldritch_4ier 4y ago
        Ugh this point is so old. Corporations have “legal personhood”, which shares almost nothing in common with actually being a person in the understood sense. It’s just a legal term, in the same way a state of matter and a state in the US have nothing in common except the same letters make up the term.

stkdump 4y ago

If time were symmetric, wouldn't that mean instead of causality (future is influenced by the past) and retrocausality (past is influenced by the future), there is no preference and in effect no causality at all? A&B are necessarily connected, but none of them is the cause of the other.

CuriouslyC 4y ago
If you think of it as a series of states with some prior probability, and jumps from state to state also have some probability, it isn't so much causal as correlated. If time is a true dimension and reality is the most probable universe when integrated over all of time, improbable states and transitions might occur in the "past" in order to enable high probability states and transitions in the future.

bartimus 4y ago

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.

kazinator 4y ago

The 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.

alphanumeric0 4y ago

I'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.

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nathias 4y ago

on the quantum level sure, but on the macro level it's just idealism

electrondood 4y ago

I have also come to this conclusion. I have had experiences that cannot possibly be explained unless at least some future events already exist. This also explained the "probabilistic" nature of quantum behaviors; it's only probabilistic to us because we are unaware of the influence of future events. I now believe it's extremely likely that the universe is superdetermined, and I gave up the idea of actual free will long ago. Highly recommend "Time Loops" by Eric Wargo.

acyou 4y ago
Could you please expand on the experiences that you have had, that can't be explained without future events already existing?
contravariant 4y ago
Superdeterminism is a cop-out where the universe is simultaneously the only existing one and the most common possible one, for no obvious reason. But yeah we'd like to think there's just one past and multiple different futures, but the fact that the laws of physics are time-reversible kind of makes it unlikely for both to be true.
mock-possum 4y ago
> I have had experiences that cannot possibly be explained unless at least some future events already exist you can't just drop something like this and then walk away without telling the rest of the story

plebianRube 4y ago

I try to tell my 'past' self events that have occurred. I also try to listen to any future 'self' notifications. It's mostly a fun thought experiment.

acyou 4y ago

The idea that there are "causes" and that there are "effects", and that these are separate and distinct, is in some way on a parallel with the idea that the past influences the future, and vice versa. If we think that the past influences the future, then it's just as reasonable to think that the future influences the past. Personally, I view "causes" and "effects" as abstractions that we use to help interpret our complicated world, nothing more. That's not to say that it's not legitimate to talk about causes and effects and to reason using them, but when seriously considered, anything that absolutely looks like definitely a cause or an effect, needs to be considered again with the system boundaries re-drawn, that is to say, with the system boundaries drawn around the whole universe. Take for example the cigarette lighting the forest on fire. Saying that the cigarette caused the fire is as much of a value judgement and political statement as saying that the decades-long drought caused the fire, or that humans causing global warming caused the fire, or that the cigarette companies caused the fire, or that God caused the fire. The emotional response that each of these statements elicits in various people should tell you that any statement linking cause and effect is emotional and political at its core. This reflects the nature of the humans that create these statements. We have a built-in tendency to try to assign causes to events and effects. We should zoom out enough to understand that this is part of our humanity, not part of the way that the universe works.

mikewarot 4y ago

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 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_absorber_theory https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Wheeler%E2%80%93Feynman_absorb... [2] https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Transactional_interpretation https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Transactional_interpretation [3] https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Afshar_experiment https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Afshar_experiment

didericis 4y ago
This comment will probably give you hives, but the inability to interpret things like QM literally and the inability of the left brain to process things holistically seems relevant to the interpretability problem. See Iain McGilchrist's "The Matter with Things". (I promise it's less woo-woo than it appears)
- mikewarot 4y ago
  I started watching an interview with McGilchrist about the work in question, there was no physics, just a boatload of philosophy. It turns out I don't need physics to be interpretable, just a workable predictive tool.
  - didericis 4y ago
    Fair enough. According to his thesis, the metaphysics/philosophy aspect of this stuff is in a right hemisphere bucket. While there may be reason to meditate on that if you’re a researcher wanting to gain better intuition, if you want to use physics as a tool, the aspects useful to the left hemisphere are all you need/the thesis is irrelevant.

neets 4y ago

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-science-of-life-morphic-resonance https://www.sheldrake.org/books-by-rupert-sheldrake/a-new-sc...)

mtlmtlmtlmtl 4y ago

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 <direction> wing media herp derp. Not interested.)

49erfangoniners 4y ago

Thanks Vice

strohwueste 4y ago

A very common thought in speculative Design. Eben if it is a bit true event in the future, an imagined event can change the present as the perception of the past. See utopias and dystopia as example. If we say this known known in the future it already affected the present and also the past. It gets interesting for the unknowns unknowns if those will change the past and present. But already accepting that there unknown unknowns changes the present.

hislaziness 4y ago

Where can I read a more scientific treatment of this topic?

quantum_state 4y ago

IMHO, it’s not even wrong … let’s not waste time on it.

arcastroe 4y ago

To anyone knowledgable. Are theories of retrocausality also related to: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/One-electron_universe https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/One-electron_universe ?

omazurov 4y ago

>...retrocausal models also open avenues of exploring a “time-symmetric” view of our universe, in which the laws of physics are the same regardless of whether time runs forward or backward. ... or sideways! If you want a visual model that may help to build some intuition about that, I have one at [1]. Retrocausality is not explicitly spelled out in that model but "it's uh... uh... it's down there somewhere". [1] https://github.com/OlegMazurov/Janus https://github.com/OlegMazurov/Janus

Operative0198 4y ago

A growing number of scientists recently watched 'Tenet'.

Haga 4y ago

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thenoblesunfish 4y ago

So what? I'm assuming that some people have some models of physics based on equations, and those don't happen to be of the kind where the state for some t <= T determines the state for t > T. Ok, great - does that predict or explain or simplify anything interesting about the observable universe?

fuzzfactor 4y ago

>A growing number of scientists are convinced the future influences the past A growing number of people in general are becoming more superstitious, and more easily convinced of even more incredible occurrences.

neodymiumphish 4y ago

Asimov's The Last Question is all I can think of. https://en.m.wikipedia.org/wiki/The_Last_Question https://en.m.wikipedia.org/wiki/The_Last_Question

euroderf 4y ago

Been kinda wonderin'bout this. Human memory is a chemical process driven by entropy ("more or less"?), making it one-way(?), so retrocausal info wouldn't be accessed via any mechanism associated with stored memory.

euroderf 4y ago

Cause-precedes-effect, meet retrocausality. FTL FTW! Oops a new science fiction trope.

naveen99 4y ago

The past is not so much more knowable than the future. the future is about as predictable as the past is knowable.

cuteboy19 4y ago

I'd rather read backreaction. These articles always handwave all the actual relevant stuff and give poor pop sci analogies that aren't helpful or accurate