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You do not understand. Let me rephrase. You go on a space ship, on your way to the edges of the universe. Your buddy goes on a space ship, on his way to the
by loup-vaillant 13y ago
You do not understand. Let me rephrase.
You go on a space ship, on your way to the edges of the universe. Your buddy goes on a space ship, on his way to the other side of the universe. You will soon be outside each other's observable universe.
Now, if you drop something in your ship (it spins, so you have gravity), you can "reverse time", and pull it back up. Can you do the same to you buddy's ship, should something ever fall there?
The simple answer is no. You can't. He's on his own.
Now there _is_ a way I haven't spoken of: non-causal interaction. You and your buddy could agree on some things before you depart. For instance, you could agree to pull back up whatever falls.
With Everett branches, it's even easier: you pre-commit to reversing your own Everett branch, whatever it is, so all your selves do it. If successful, the worlds should merge back together, at least locally. Just one catch: all your other selves must successfully reverse time locally. It only takes one failure for the plan to fail.
But if you want to reverse time after the fact, say because you happen to be in an Everett branch you don't like (you lost a bet about which way the photon will go), you won't be able to reverse time here, because your other self certainly will not (he won the bet, so…). Maybe, just maybe, you could use the vanishingly small entanglement left with the other Everett Branch to directly communicate with your other self. I'm not even sure it can be done in principle. For practical purposes, it should be forever beyond reach, even if you have a super-intelligent AI to help you.
- shasta 13y ago> Maybe, just maybe, you could use the vanishingly small entanglement left with the other Everett Branch to directly communicate with your other self. I'm not even sure it can be done in principle. My understanding is that this would violate a physical law that we still believe to hold. You're right though, that I don't understand. At least I thought I understood your last post. With this one, I don't follow the connection to the OP.
- loup-vaillant 13y agoOops, I didn't intent to obscure my meaning. I was replying mainly to mbq: https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=7602812 https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=7602812 My understanding is, with QM, is is even harder or even impossible to reverse time, even with perfect knowledge of your reachable surroundings. In a classical universe however, it looks much easier, so in such a universe, the explanation for time is less satisfactory.