A couple of thoughts;

"you cannot say anything about the state of particles before you observe them, and that the only hard facts in the world are the results spit out of quantum experiments."

What are "hard facts?" Say you take a human body and ask yourself; What is "hard?" The answer would be the skeleton. While that might be the structure of the body, it's not its basis, which would be a fertilized seed. There seems to be a similar tendency to think of what is most stable and repeatable about nature must be the most foundational as well. Yet these tend to be more idealizations, than essences. For instance, a dimensionless point is an ideal of location, but that doesn't make it the basis of space. Is Euclidian geometry foundational to space, or only our ability to model it? If it is foundational to space, why are there so few naturally occurring straight lines and right angles? As opposed to us starting out in kindergarten with a pencil, paper and ruler.

Similarly with time, physics treats the measurement, duration, as more foundational that what is being measured, action. It is the inertia of action which makes time asymmetric, rather than symmetric, because a unit of time would be the same duration whether measured from event A to B, or B to A.

Time, like temperature, color, pressure, etc, is an effect of action. It is only because our rational thought processes are a sequential function, that we think of time as the present moving past to future, rather than change turning future into past, within the physical context of the present. Duration is the state of the present, as these events form and dissolve.

So time is an effect of causality, not the other way around. It is just that the energy output of one event might be a minimal amount of the energy input into what seems like the sequential event. Kicking a ball causes it to move, because there is a transition of energy, but yesterday didn't cause today. The sun shining on a spinning planet creates this effect called days.

As such, thermodynamics better describes the larger picture, in that while high pressure is causal energy, low pressure is the groves, channels, niches, etc, which this energy fills and alters, creating endless feedback loops.

So events have to occur, in order to be fully determined. They are first in the present, then in the past. Alan Watts used the example of a boat and its wake as an analogy. In that the wake, as the past, doesn't steer the boat, rather the boat creates the wake. Yet because our minds are memory, we think of the past as events, when it is really only residual effects. The present, like low pressure, consumes the energy of the past, just as the inertia of this energy propels it into the future. So energy goes past to future, as the events defining this process go future to past. All as feedback within the present.

Hi Everyone!

    Sounds like 4 or 5 thoughts to me John..

    But I guess it would be the same number, backwards as forwards. Not that it means much; I'm only saying...

    All the Best,

    Jonathan

    John,

    Reality is not in need of being rescued. As noted in my FQXI essay four years ago, Quantum Physics is in need of being rescued, from Physicists' persistent Misinterpretation of Reality, resulting from their lack of understanding of the nature of "information".

    The reason "you cannot say anything about the state of particles before you observe them", is simply because the properties being observed, are not even properties of the things being observed (the particles do not contain, and thus cannot convey, the information being extracted from the observations). They are properties of the relationship BETWEEN those things and the observer (such as a phase angle, or a relative position), that is not even defined, until AFTER the observer specifies exactly which relationship is to be observed. And then, to make matters worse, when the actual property of the thing (such as an ability to convey only a single bit of information) is confused for something else, as a result of the observer's intense desire to have it convey more information that its properties enable, all sorts of supposed "weird" phenomenon manifest themselves, in the minds of those observers. That has been the sad reality now, of all the so-called interpretations of QM, for nearly a century.

    Rob McEachern

    Tom,

    In regards to retrocausality, As Laplace remarked in another context, "I have no need of that hypothesis.", in order to rescue reality.

    Rob McEachern

    Good response, Rob. With past entropy identical to future entropy, the issue is indeed moot.

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    Dear Becker,

    Observable reality is not debatable. The real observable Universe must be constructed in the simplest physical fashion allowable. Only one unified visible infinite surface that am always illuminated by infinite non-surface light eternally exists.

    You do not have to think about it, or explain it, or analyze it, or compare it, or compute it. All you have to do to convince yourself that I am being truthful is to open your eyes. No matter in which direction you look, you will only be able to see surface. If you open your eyes in a scientific laboratory, you will see surface. If you open your eyes in the rear storage room of a dilapidated Cairo brothel, you will see surface. You can always amuse yourself by adapting your behavior to the surface you happen to be looking at.

    Joe Fisher, Realist

    Jonathan,

    My math is fuzzy. Goes without saying.

    Robert,

    The question is how to get them to push the reset button. As anyone following it at all realizes, it will probably take them another ten years to just beat string theory back far enough to even think about looking at the bigger picture. So while I have a fairly good idea where you are coming from, on a basic sociological level, you are beating your head against the wall, trying to overcome the bureaucratic inertia. Like politics, the ones with the power to affect the situation are the ones most beholden to the current models and assumptions.

    When it does break open, then change will be as likely radical, as incremental. So the Molotov cocktails I like to toss are not really intended to convince, so much as to stretch the bounds of possibilities as much as possible.

    John,

    If history is any example, overcoming "bureaucratic inertia" generally requires waiting until the current generation of bureaucrats has died. For someone like Clausewitz ("War is the continuation of politics by other means.", it might be acceptable to accelerate that process, by introducing them to an early grave. But that methodology is frowned upon in science. Rather than throwing Molotov cocktails, I prefer to plant seeds, even though I have come to know that I am unlikely to live long enough to see them grow to fruition.

    Rob McEachern

    Robert,

    As they say of the stock markets; They can remain irrational for longer than you can remain solvent.

    It is relatively easy to perceive the basic cycle and where we are in it, pretty much the speculative mania phase, with everything from multiworlds to multiverses, but affecting the pace of the dynamic is in the moving mountains category.

    One can only hope some earthquake type fracture will occur, but the opposite is also possible. With the coming economic meltdown, we might enter a fall of Rome stage, which likely helped prolong the geocentric cosmology for several more centuries than it might otherwise have held up. Then all this nonsense gets canonized and calcified as the wisdom of the golden years.

    cheers.

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    Isn't free will completely lost in a model like this? A high price to pay for "rescuing reality".

      Dear Jim,

      No part of visible infinite surface that am always illuminated by infinite non-surface light could ever have been affected by any imaginary person's abstract invisible will.

      My 500 word essay. ONLY INFINITE SURFACE MATTERS has been accepted by the female Peer Review Manager of the CHAOS Journal of the American Physics Institute. I expect it to be rejected by the white male editor on Monday without it being sent out for Peer Revue. I happened to have called the editor a codswallop peddling mindless imbecile a couple of years ago, and my guess is that he has not forgotten about that,

      Joe Fisher, Realist

      Reality does not need to be rescued from entanglement and quantum bonds are what hold matter together and quantum entanglement is what holds the universe together as well. Charge is an exchange of single photons and gravity is an exchange of biphotons. While source and observer do not commute for the single photon exchange of charge, source and observer do commute for the biphoton exchange of gravity.

      This means that charge bonds are subject to the uncertainty principle while gravity bonds are not subject to the limits of uncertainty because of the symmetry of the biphoton exchange. Gravity is the simultaneous excitation and exchange between source and observer as a biphoton while charge is a single photon exchange.

      While gravity does not change when source and observer switch, charge does change when source and observer switch. Far from being unreal, entanglement of amplitude and phase is what makes the universe the way that it is and not the GR geodesics of causal gravity. Causal GR gravity is simply a special case that works for much but not all of the universe.

        "Causal GR gravity is simply a special case that works for much but not all of the universe."

        That would violate the principle of uniformity.

        Dear Pentcho,

        Reality is not scientific. Although FQXi.org only pays Grants to the proponents of the finite invisible atoms swirling finitely about in finite invisible space unrealistic point of view, FQXi.org has published my contention that although I am eighty-one years old, I am convinced that the real Universe must be constructed in the simplest fashion permissible. All I am asking anyone to do is to notice that no matter in which direction one looks, one will only ever see a plethora of seamlessly enmeshed varied colored surfaces. One cannot see invisible empty space no matter how carefully one looks for it, even by peering through the Hubble Space Telescope. There must only be one unified visible infinite surface that am always illuminated by infinite non-surface light. When one uses the word "is," one implies a finite state arising from a previous finite state of was. The word "am" is truly descriptive of a state of infinity.

        Joe Fisher, Realist

        Dear Steve Agnew, and Thomas,

        Reality is not entangled. Reality is not scientific. Although FQXi.org only pays Grants to the proponents of the finite invisible atoms swirling finitely about in finite invisible space unrealistic point of view, FQXi.org has published my contention that although I am eighty-one years old, I am convinced that the real Universe must be constructed in the simplest fashion permissible. All I am asking anyone to do is to notice that no matter in which direction one looks, one will only ever see a plethora of seamlessly enmeshed varied colored surfaces. One cannot see invisible empty space no matter how carefully one looks for it, even by peering through the Hubble Space Telescope. There must only be one unified visible infinite surface that am always illuminated by infinite non-surface light. When one uses the word "is," one implies a finite state arising from a previous finite state of was. The word "am" is truly descriptive of a state of infinity.

        Joe Fisher, Realist

        As expected, even though the Peer Review manager found my essay acceptable, as soon as the female Peer Review Manager of the CHAOS Journal showed my brilliant 500 word essay, ONLY INFINITE SURFACE MATTERS to the white male editor to make sure it was sent out to the right knowledgeable Peer Reviewers, he decided to reject it without sending it out for Peer Review. The ignorant jackass only publishes codswallop about invisible quantum particles entanglements taking place in invisible space.

        Joe Fisher, Realist

        The problem with theoretical physics is that the theorist are trying to devise a finite system containing invisible strings of impulses, or even more bizarre, writing endless codswallop tracts about invisible multiverses. Only visible infinite surface that am always illuminated by infinite non-surface light am.

        Joe Fisher, Realist