Robert,

If I were to continue in this vein I'd feel like I was hijacking the discussion thread and moving too far away from the original article. From this point forward we'd really be discussing idealism vs. materialism and my point of view is basically that of George Berkeley. In my dreams, I'm his disciple and interpreter for the 21st century.

    Being seen is one of the criteria that can be used to say something is physical. However that definition does not take into account the sensory process. Both information source and observed output are actual' existings/happenings'and not merely theoretical. Both can be included as physical and may be usefully differentiated as physical actualisations and physical manifestations.

    Jack Sarfatti said:

    "FTL violates relativity.

    Back From The Future does not."

    Steve Dufourny said:

    "We cannot travel in time ... "

    Steve can speak for himself, but, my understanding of his meaning is that we cannot travel back to the past or jump forward into the future and he is, of course, correct.

    Jack Sarfatti's claim that we can go from the future to the past is empirically unsupportable. Time has never been included as a unique fundamental property in physics equations. The 't' in physics equations represents a count of cyclic object activity. Objects may be able to cycle in reverse, but even theorists can't travel back in time.

    I have unified gravity AND electromagnetism.

    Inertial resistance is proportional to gravitational force/energy.

    Tom,

    Attraction as well as repulsion are mutual phenomena. That's why I cannot imagine unilateral propagation of them like propagation of light. Steve A's biphotonic argument sounds appealing to me.

    Elsewhere I found an other possibly good idea of him concerning decay.

    Did you deal with it? Did you deal with Rob's opinion concerning entanglement?

    Admittedly I didn't read all postings, and I am still suspecting that phase in QM might be elated to a mathematical artifact of complex representation. Nature hardly exhibits perfect mirror symmetries.

    Elsewhere I am waiting for your reply concerning my Fig. 1. While the ordinary time scale is best suited for ubiquitous not yet local comparison, the scale of elapsed time is the natural one for local description.

    ++++

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    The space that we experience involves a balance of gravity/acceleration and inertia/inertial resistance, as this balances and unifies gravity AND electromagnetism.

    Acceleration is proportional to inertial resistance for the same reason that gravity/acceleration involves balanced inertia/inertial resistance. "Mass" is ELECTROMAGNETISM/energy, as inertia/inertial resistance is proportional to gravitational force/energy; as this balances and unifies gravity AND electromagnetism; AND this explains F=ma AND E=mc2. (c is inertial resistance, and c2 is a balanced/relative acceleration.)

    Tom,

    Hopefully you didn't overlook my questions.

    Considering retrocausality one more unnecessary attempt to rescue silly speculations, I quote Jim: "initial conditions exists". Do initial conditions really exist on the same level as do observable physical quantities? Definitely not. Rob is correct. Someone who used to operate with initioal conditions knows that they are arbitrarily chosen starting points of mathematical models. Strictly speaking, there are in reality no starting points. Adam and Eve are fairy tales.

    ++++

    I think Berkeley's ideas on perception were interesting in their time. But he overlooked the same minimalist case being overlooked by today's physicists: if there is only a single bit of information present, to ever be perceived within something, do you really think you can form multiple, independent perceptions of it? Such a minimal perception only requires a minimal mind (no mind at all) in order to perceive it - simply behaving as if it even exists (exhibiting any behavior at all, even just being deflected by its presence), is all that it takes. If you cannot detect that a substance even exists, then phenomenon like "quantum tunneling" right through it, is not only possible, but inevitable.

    By the way, are you familiar with the Closer To Truth website? There are a lot of interesting philosophical interviews, in addition to scientific ones.

    Rob McEachern

    Yes I've seen the Closer To The Truth site. My initial impression was one of yet another attempt to sell the public on the view that science and traditional (i.e. Christian) religion are somehow on an equal basis and that some sort of amalgam is the way forward. I don't agree.

    Forgive me if I am missing something subtle here but it seems as if this article is presenting Leifer's idea thus:

    Quantum entanglement violates local realism, as it appears to require faster-than-light messaging. Rather than accept the non locality required (and mathematically verified by Bell's theorem), let us rescue local realism by invoking backwards in time messaging. The obvious problem is that backwards in time messaging is also prohibited in a local (material) framework. Photons, or any other kind of material medium, do not travel backwards in time. So a quantum experiment in which the result is achieved via backwards in time is just as nonlocal as one achieved by FTL messaging.

    Seems like yet another attempt to sidestep quantum non locality, and not a very sophisticated one at that.

      Jack Sarfatti,

      From my message above: "Which kind of time is involved in your view of 'timelike'? In case there is any uncertainty about what I mean by 'unique fundamental time', it is not a measure of object activity. The unit of second does not measure it. The unit of second is a measure of object activity. It is defined as such. My reason for asking this question is that I find [theoretical] physicists' claims that a measure of object activity is the property of time, as being empirically unsupportable. The empirical evidence for object activity contains an indefinable property of time as part of its basis. What time is your time?"

      What kind of time are you using when you say: "FTL violates relativity. Back From The Future does not." Can you please give your definition of time, and, compare your definition of time with your understanding of the continued indefinable status of time as a property of empirical evidence? Thank you.

      Lots of people have missed something rather subtle. Einstein was correct - "Subtle is the Lord." Bell's Theorem is based on a well-known assumption. That assumption has now been demonstrated to be false - and demonstrated the old-fashioned way - by actually constructing a simple, classical system that produces the same correlations as the so-called Quantum Correlations. See the link at the top of this page.

      Rob McEachern

      This is a very subtle point indeed. The mistake is in the presumption of instantaneous time, which is a useful but ultimately limited approximation. Time only emerges from action, not the other way around, and so time really does not exist independent of the matter and action from which it emerges. Since actions are finite, moments are also finite.

      Action is what transmits information and action is limited to something that science calls the speed of light in space. However, quantum phase is also a part of action as well and so entanglement or phase correlation is a part of quantum but not classical action. It is therefore the emergences of both time and space from the actions of matter that is what orders the universe and limits information transfer. Although photon transmission through space is a very useful approximation of reality, it is just an approximation.

      Thus it is the very words that science uses like quantum jump or simultaneous or local that are the very impediments for understanding the way the universe works.

      Gavin William Rowland,

      That's sure what I got out of the article. I'm not a mathematician or a physicist, so I'm simply left wondering: what could backwards in time "messaging" even mean, when the concepts of "sending a message" or "affecting" imply causality, an interval of time, a now-and-then sequence? If you simply gut the meaning of those words and can only show me a page of incomprehensible math, I will not feel that realism is being restored. To be fair, I'd like to hear what the people working on this concept might try to offer in the way of a natural-language explanation.

        The mistake has nothing to do with time, or even physics - it resides within the mathematical description of the observations. In the best, general description of Bell's theorem that I have ever come across ("The Quantum Theory and Reality", Bernard d'Espagnat", Scientific American, Nov. 1979) d'Espagnat identifies the "subtle" assumption: "These conclusions require a subtle but important extension of the meaning assigned to a notation such as A. Whereas previously A was merely one possible outcome of a measurement made on a particle, it is converted by this argument into an attribute of the particle itself."

        In other words, the simply act of making multiple measurements (of supposed, multiple spin or polarization components) has been "converted" into the belief that multiple components actually exist, as "attributes of the particle itself." The problem is, that single bits of information do not and cannot have multiple components. Hence, any system that has the "attribute" of possessing only a single bit of information, will render the "subtle but important extension" totally false. The paper linked to above, constructs just such a system, and then demonstrates that it also exhibits the so-called "quantum correlations", despite the fact that most physicists have deemed that to be impossible, for any classical system.

        Rob McEachern

        If you say the future "affects" the past, my reaction is that you're just misusing a word. In a static 4 dimensional block universe, I would agree that one could say adjacent points on a time-like line somehow constrain each other, but that amounts to geometry. The 4 corners of a square constrain each other's locations, but they're not messaging or "affecting" each other, at least in the agreed-upon meanings of those words, because there's no action involved. Now rotate that square so it aligns with your time axis, with 2 corners in the future and 2 in the past...

          Yes agreed Jim. I'm not a mathematician or physicist either, but i find it hard to see how backwards causation can help rescue local realism. Either there is some kind of deep explanation, as Steve and Robert suggest, or local realism is violated. But as far as I understand it is violated whether you go for instantaneous action at a distance OR backwards causation.

          As you say it would be interesting to hear what Leifer has to say about his proposal. Personally I think quantum non locality is mediated by, or occurs within, the nonmaterial dark energy which is supposed to be everywhere. I guess everyone comes up with their own explanation, which is why we have so many interpretations of QM's.

          I realize that this is difficult for civilians because it is difficult for a technical audience as well.

          Time and space are very useful notions, but time and space simply do not represent all of the action in the universe. The universe is full of matter and that matter is in all kinds of action.

          All can agree on this.

          Actions follow a natural order that science calls time, but quantum actions also show the property of phase coherence. Phase coherence makes it seem like an action in one part of the universe determines an effect in a very different part of the universe instantaneously. Therefore in time, phase coherence can make it seem like an action precedes its cause and so backwards messaging is born. Note that people very much smarter than I spend many pages of discourse over this simple proposition.

          Science does not measure events from the future because there are no certain quantum futures and measurements only take place in the present moment. It is classical logic that suggests that the future might affect the past. The singularities of classical logic allow any number of odd results.

          Quantum logic says the future is largely but not completely predictable and so no quantum action precedes its quantum effect.