Quantum idea where the present influences the past gains some theoretical support

Quantum idea where the present influences the past gains some theoretical support
http://www.iflscience.com/physics/q...nces-the-past-gains-some-theoretical-support/

Here's an interesting idea that is similar to a topic I posted a few years ago (see: Quantum time the future affects the past).

I find it interesting that they think the present affects the past, like in my other topic, but this time they are coming up with the idea that it can replace the idea of quantum entanglement. Now I don't understand how it can REPLACE entanglement but it's certainly looking like the past isn't the already fixed and settled thing we all thought it was. Wow!

It even looks like they have math to back it up, whatever that is.

 

Love this weird stuff. And yet our views of reality is still by and large a materialistic view as the discoveries at the smallest level of reality, which dictates macro reality is not affecting our views of the nature of reality very much at all. Perhaps there is room for an observer in evolutionary biology and such? Perhaps consciousness is missing from TOE? Due to materialism disavowing it, from the get go? So the corner stone was excluding from the building?

 

Very cool stuff. I love the strangeness of the quantum world. There are definitely hints that our understanding of space and especially time may be far more intricate than we ever imagined. I just finished Now: The Physics of Time by Richard Muller. It's a great read if you're interested in the topic of time.

 

I had this Quantum Idea. Really Quantum man.
Really!
But now I forget. I should have written it down.

Moi

 

The math is still fundamentally the same, it's just a different philosophical interpretation.

The past is correlated to the future. To speak of "cause and effect" is giving a human perspective on what the observed reality is.

 

Ok, if you change the past state how would you know that you have changed it? Reversing a past state is not the same as reversing a state in the past. In other words, if you alter the time line then what subsequently follows must be altered. In energy terms, you must use some kind of energy to change a state and that involves a passage of time going forwards.

 

That's not really how it works.

What appears to be randomness actually isn't, apparently things that happen now take into account future events. Typically how this manifests is in statistical bias. What might normally happen with a certain statistical frequency changes when the wave-function becomes entangled with something else, even if that is at a distant point in space or the future. Actually everything in the universe is entangled, they are just entangled to different extents.

A more concrete example: take a piece of glass. Normally it reflects a certain percentage of light, and allows a certain percentage to pass through. Well, without actually doing anything to that piece of glass, we can make all the light be reflected. All we have to do is entangle one of the paths of the wavefunction of that light. This could even be the path where there is no light. Yes, that is correct. By putting the right type of setup behind the glass, theoretically even a far distance away, we can still make all the light be reflected from the glass. But our instinctual human nature is to question how did the ray of light know there was anything behind the glass? Because the ray of light would not have interacted with it until a future point in time. This is the "spooky action at a distance" Einstein wrote about. It almost seems that there is some sort of time travel, with information being sent back in time so the light knows how to properly behave. But of course, this is too simple a view.

The more likely reality is that, what appears to be a random statistical process to us is actually taking into account events in the future. If a future trajectory of the waveform is more "favorable" one way than another, it will go in that direction. Usually waves like to reinforce each other, and avoid destructive wave interference at all costs. The laws of physics don't change, so the statistical manifestation of our reality has to change to accommodate. Or rather, everything was already set in place to take account of the future, as if some sort of intelligence had already planned everything out across time.

Reality is very likely you can't change the time line. This could lead to some very bizarre effects if you went back (or tried to go back) in time. What currently only manifests as bizarreness on a microscopic quantum level would then manifest on a macroscopic level. In other words, whatever you did to try to change the time line just wouldn't be possible. There would be an extremely bizarre set of coincidences which would preclude all your efforts. Probability would start working against you. Keep in mind the most very basic rules of nature operate on probability, going down to an electron in orbit around the nucleus of an atom. No fundamental laws of nature would be broken, but the probability bias could do some strange things. Your past efforts to change time would end up being a part of the cause of what you were trying to prevent happening.

Note that this is only a force, and it could conceivably be possible that if enough matter-energy were constructively entangled with something, it might be possible to break the entanglement effects preventing you from altering the time line. In other words, if you want to think of it this way, piercing the fabric of space-time. No one knows if this is even possible or how much energy it would take, or if it is even practically possible to generate this amount of energy. But all you need to know is there is very strong force preventing you from trying to alter the time line. I'm thinking even if you were able to do this, the two time lines would find a way of coalescing back together somehow. (People simply would not have enough information to know for certain whether a certain event occurred or not)

 

"Usually waves like to reinforce each other, and avoid destructive wave interference at all costs."

When you start anthropomorphizing non-human physical entities you are on shaky ground. As Yoda might say: "There is no like or dislike, there is only *is*".

The referenced articles states: "The model assumes that quantum theory is perfectly symmetric in time".

This is a *huge* assumption. As the coffee in a coffee cup becomes entangled with everything in the environment we can use quantum probability to suggest where that entanglement will go. Trying to unravel all the entanglements after time has moved forward is not so amenable to determination. At a single point in time even a quantum particle described by probabilities *does* have a singular state in reality from which probabilities can be used to tell us what is going to happen. It is highly unlikely that it is possible to look backward from the present to determine the actual singular state in the past from which the present evolved.

In other words, even if you move back in time it is highly unlikely that you can know where you will wind up! This makes the assumption that quantum theory is perfectly symmetric in time highly unlikely.

I don't have access to the actual paper but I would love to see the math even if I doubt the assumption used!

 

Whoa Ted! We need to remember to entangle those particles in the future, so that trash can will fall on my dad's head!

But Bill, it did fall on his head, so we will remember!

 

So does this mean that the Big Bang could have been self-started by quantum effects that were going to happen in the future?

 

It seems unlikely, but theoretically, yes.

Some other outlandish theories include the possibility that humans came into existence because, at some point, they will develop the technological capability to carry out something essential to the universe. The development of other, more primitive forms of life would just be a probabilistic offshoot of that, presumably. So the whole universe behaves like a giant quantum computer and brings things into existence that are needed in the future.

 

My take is that the history can't be known until it is determined by current or future events. That is to say, this only works if no observations are made on the history of the system that would collapse the wave function.

You don't change history because a unique history doesn't exist yet.

 

So essentially, the probabilities of this happening on any significant scale are so remote that it is practically improbable and so only exists as a theoretical framework to make sense of Quantum Mechanics. The argument is not much different to that used by religions to justify theism along the lines of, 'you can't discount the possibility so there is a probability'. Hate to say it but, this is just going to lead to a whole lot of pseudo scientific metaphysics, again.

 

No, statistics are not the same as voodoo. They tell us how often something can be expected to occur mathematically, not philosophically.

We can never know if a model describes the essence of reality or just provides the correct results. The key is that QM and GR yield the correct results every time they are tested. They have never been wrong within their domain of applicability - GR at large scale and QM at small scale.

Religion and pseudo science have never made correct predictions. They cannot be used to model the real world and yield the correct results.

 

What is interesting is this: One can often imagine scenarios where QM would seem to allow for macroscopic [large scale] manifestations of this spooky world that seems so counter intuitive. We can imagine ways to demonstrate these spooky properties in practical and real terms that we would all recognize. Time after time what one finds is that the odds of such occurrences are so long, that the universe isn't nearly old enough. If we wait another 100 billion years, we might catch it in the act.

 

FYI.

I said the arguments are the same, not that they are the same.

 

Here's something baffling to think about: Even if you observe what happened, you're still part of someone else's wave function! It's all a matter of relative perspective.

The wave function only collapsed from your perspective. It might not have collapsed from an outsider's perspective.
And as soon as you observe something you are entangled with it.

Furthermore there are different degrees of entanglement. Everything is entangled with everything else to some extent. And it can be possible for certain properties of a particular particle to be entangled while other properties are not. That means the particle will seem to behave like a wave only in certain ways, depending on which of its properties were observed.

 

I was once talking to a quantum cosmologist about entanglement. They get into the wave function of the universe and run into this problem of reduction. One school of thought is that when I make an observation, I don't collapse the wave function of the universe, rather, my wave function collapses into a unique reality.

 

One nagging fact that comes to mind from time to time comes from the Liénard–Wiechert potentials - the complete classic description of a charge in motion [note that even though classically derived, it is also Relativistic].

For any observer, the electric field from a charge in motion points directly at [or away from] the actual position of the charge at any moment. i.e. Even though the information comes from the charge in the past [due to propagation delay], the electric field acts as if it is from the present and instantaneous - having no propagation delay for the field.

There are situations, such as where we have a charge in circular motion, where were this not true there would be a violation conservation principles. But there is no obvious reason why it must always be true. And it has the flavor of a deeper principle at work. But no one has ever been able to offer any insights.

 

That's a really interesting phenomena. Photons do carry the electromagnetic field but they don't seem to carry any energy in this case. I believe this is what you'd call 'virtual bosons'. It has to do with forbidden quantum states, the electron in orbit can't collapse any lower. Yet it is moving, and so conveys electromagnetic flux (which I'm presuming is in the form of photons). Do these photons have energy? Perhaps the energy is arrising out of the vacuum state. Or perhaps it's only a wave function of a photon that doesn't actually exist, that's mediating the effect. Sometimes particles can behave like a wave and be as if they existed in two places at once in some ways (although of course energy is never in two places at once). This would be an example of "spooky action at a distance" most likely, i.e. the wave can affect the statistical probability of a distant particle, even if the first particle (the one corresponding to the wave) isn't actually there.

 

Are you sure?

http://bigthink.com/dr-kakus-universe/nobel-prize-awarded-to-two-quantum-physicists

I would have to dig up my old QM books to understand how mass [energy] plays into superposition. But it would seem that to exist in two places suggests the energy exists in two places.

 

Whether it truly exists in two places is more of a philosophical question.
We can only observe effects and come up with mathematical equations to model what is happening. But actually coming up with the reasons behind those effects is entering the field of subjectivity.
We've never actually observed a particle in two places at once, but particles seem to behave that way, and have effects that correlate to the position and movement of other particles. It's almost as if the wave function is inextricably connected to where the point-like particle can be or will go. And the wave function is something we don't actually directly see, although you need it mathematically to describe the behavior of the particle.

The wave function can carry information across vast distances or through time, but to my knowledge I've never heard of it being able to carry energy.

I'm really departing into the field of speculation here, but even if it couldn't carry actual real energy, I suppose it could theoretically be possible for it to carry work energy in the form of thermodynamic disequilibrium (i.e. the basic energy would already exist at the destination point but it would be in the form of a system with maximum entropy that couldn't be harnessed on its own, like heat for example).

Hope that isn't too difficult to contemplate.

 

Now we're in trouble because it is looking more and more like energy is just a manifestation of information! [i.e. the solution to the Maxwell's Demon Paradox]

But beyond that I am having flashbacks of Feynman and QED - it's deja vu all over again.

 

Yes, you clearly get it.

I'm sending you a virtual boson...

Hmm, wondering if those things may be able to travel back in time.