But what of Eddington's Arrow of Time?
From Motherboard at Vice, March 16:
“Our instincts of time and causation are our deepest, strongest instincts that physicists and philosophers—and humans—are loath to give up,” said one scientist.
Have you ever found yourself in a self-imposed jam and thought, “Well, if it isn’t the consequences of my own actions”? It’s a common refrain that exposes a deeper truth about the way we humans understand time and causality. Our actions in the past are correlated to our experience of the future, whether that’s a good outcome, like acing a test because you prepared, or a bad one, like waking up with a killer hangover.
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.
In other words, people are becoming increasingly “retro-curious,” said Kenneth Wharton, a professor of physics at San Jose State University who has published research about retrocausality, in a call with Motherboard. Even though it may feel verboten to consider a future that affects the past, Wharton and others think it could account for some of the strange phenomena observed in quantum physics, which exists on the tiny scale of atoms.
“We have instincts about all sorts of things, and some are stronger than others,” said Wharton, who recently co-authored an article about retrocausality with Huw Price, a distinguished professor emeritus at the University of Bonn and an emeritus fellow of Trinity College, Cambridge.
“I’ve found our instincts of time and causation are our deepest, strongest instincts that physicists and philosophers—and humans—are loath to give up,” he added.
cientists, including Price, have speculated about the possibility that the future might influence the past for decades, but the renewed curiosity about retrocausality is driven by more recent findings about quantum mechanics.
Unlike the familiar macroscopic world that we inhabit, which is governed by classical physics, the quantum realm allows for inexplicably trippy phenomena. Particles at these scales can breeze right through seemingly impassable barriers, a trick called quantum tunneling, or they can occupy many different states simultaneously, known as superposition.
The properties of quantum objects can also somehow become synced up together even if they are located light years apart. This so-called “quantum entanglement” was famously described by Albert Einstein as “spooky action at a distance,” and experimental research into it just earned the 2022 Nobel Prize in Physics.
Quantum entanglement flouts a lot of our assumptions about the universe, prompting scientists to wonder which of our treasured darlings in physics must be killed to account for it. For some, it’s the idea of “locality,” which essentially means that objects should not be able to interact at great distances without some kind of physical mediator. Other researchers think that “realism”—the idea that there is some kind of objective bedrock to our existence—should be sacrificed at the altar of entanglement.
Wharton and Price, among many others, are embracing a third option: Retrocausality. 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.....
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