Time and Causality by William R. Wharton

Hello William,

I liked your essay about causal chains.

I agree with you that, properly interpreted, Quantum Mechanics involves a kind of "backward causation" that makes quantum non-locality compatible with Special Relativity.

Regards,

Cristi Stoica

Professor Wharton,

There is a natural feature to time I based my entry on, but doesn't seem to draw attention in these many other essays on the topic. It is that while the present goes from past events to future ones, these particular events go from being in the future to being in the past. It seems to me that much of the problem with understanding time is caused by this assumption that all aspects of time travel from the past into the future and the only way around is to propose some form of "block time," or other mechanism where the essential dynamic is negated. Since your essay seems to be an effort to peel away this particular encrustation to examine the underlaying dynamics, I thought I'd pose the point to you for consideration.

Consider that any motion, or cycling, or process is going through a progression of events. Your chain of causality. What is time? Is it some underlaying dimension along which physical reality travels, from past events to future ones? Or is it these series of events which start as future potential, then manifested by the energies determining which events prevail out of the potentials, then replaced by the next event and fade into past circumstance?

For much of human history and before, we thought of the sun as traveling from east to west, but than realized it was the earth rotating west to east. Could it be the problem with our understanding of time is a similar juxtaposition, where it is actually time going by the present of physical reality, from future to past, rather than this reality traveling along some meta-dimension from past to future?

Hi Dad,

You mention in your Bio that we have a different view of the nature of time, but you should also mention that there's some substantial overlap as well...

(For anyone else reading this, when I was a kid my father would often play our home movies in reverse and tell me that everything I saw was still obeying all the regular laws of physics. I've been trying to puzzle that one out ever since... :-)

Ken

Hello Prof. Wharton,

re:

"The

water flowing down the river is analogous to the causal chains moving forward in time. A

place where the water is stagnating is analogous to a lack of causal chains, and therefore a

lack of events."

time does seem to be largely a perceptual problem. another way of looking at it:

we can toss a hula hoop out on a lake, put a little drop of oil in the center of the ring, monitor it's dispersion, note that it eventually fills the ring fairly evenly, watch the rainbows, have great fun 'till someone from the EPA shows up.

our calculations all include the expression "on the water".

we can set a couple of marker buoys on the lake and race a couple of boats around them, calculating their relative position to one another and the marker buoys all the while, and noting that, on the boats, they are always moving forward, regardless of which way they may turn.

our calculations all include the expression "on the water".

somewhere around the middle of the shoreline, wherever the middle of of a shoreline might be, we hop in an inner tube and go dog-paddling across the lake. it's a big lake. we paddle and paddle... count the number of strokes, intending in this way to measure how big the lake is... lose site of the shoreline... never find an end to the water... maybe somewhere in the wee hours of the morning we slip exhausted from the inner tube and disappear.

again, our calculations include the expression, "on the water".

our local situation may be compared to a bunch of people on a raft being towed around the lake by the sun, much as a water-skier might be towed.

some have gotten to looking at the calculations and wonder just what that "on the water" means in them; some ask if the calculations prove that water exists, others whether or no one can dispense with the idea of "on the water" in the equations and some get to questioning if there even is any water.

i've come to suspect that time needs to be somewhat axiomatically (because of the lack of availability of contrast - we can't actually step outside time to have a look-see - necessary for the relativistic nature of a theorem) defined very simply, something along the lines of: 'time is a potential for data to exist' and to further define this relationship as non-commutative such that an absence of detectable data does not negate a potential for its existence.

big lake, with lots of stuff floating around on and in it doing all kinds of strange things. [looking at the strange things going on on the lake, such as 'causal chains' and what electrons in a hydrogen atom are doing, doesn't tend to actually yield much info regarding the lake.]

re:

"One of the most puzzling features of quantum mechanics is the appearance of non-locality

defined as causation traveling faster than the speed of light."

physicists seem fascinated with 'entanglement'. it's not a terribly big deal; not when it conveys no data (can't be used for communication) and there are well documented instances of acquisition of actual data from distant past, future and elsewhere in the present moment through some even more strange physics of consciousness. 'entanglement' cannot account for this and is a bit of a yawn by comparison. the data strongly suggests a spatial quality to 'time' and seems to support the notion of a block universe, but one which is significantly more dynamical than generally appears to be envisioned. in that at any given instance, there can only be one set of events at one space (i don't appear to be able to both sit here typing and take a walk around the block 'simultaneously'), appears deterministic, but a high degree of potential variability can arise from vectors of influence at any given instance. yet, that there is only one set of events at any one moment appears to afford a definitive set capable of being accessed predictively. the number of influence vectors involved in the orbit of the earth around the sun are minimal. the number of influence vectors involved in, say, one's crossing a busy street, get a little more complicated. where one atom may wind up at in a dispersion is even more complex. yet, at any given moment at any given location, there is only one event set. very curious dynamics. the 'chain of causation' appears to be largely an anthropocentric conventionality and oversimplification of the dynamics involved. cause and effect cannot be identified as a chain since relativity killed absolute time and can only be thought of as vector intersects of equal significance but of potentially varying magnitude (anthropocentrically, we tend to ascribe greater significance, that is - 'causal', to vectors of greater amplitude). as in an expression from Zen, 'cause and effect are one'.

see: http://www.remoteviewed.com/rob_abbott_videos.html vid #1 (while this is not perhaps the best example, i've selected it for its dramatic impact)

also: www.espresearch.com/espgeneral/doc-SpeedOfThought.pdf

see also my comments at Curiel's "Time Paradoxes", http://fqxi.org/community/forum/topic/309

re:

"However the two causally connected events can not be at different spatial locations at the same time, because the maximum speed at which the causal chain traverses space time is the speed of light, c. Human experience is restricted to the macro-world where causation only flows forward in time giving us the distinction between past and future. This is what gives us the impression that time flows."

while it serves a pragmatic function, this perception does not appear to be entirely accurate.

i'd have to agree with Hawking.

glad to meet you. happy for the opportunity for dialogue.

warm regards,

:-)

matt kolasinski

"Just because Schrödinger hasn't seen his cat lately doesn't mean it's dead."

Professor Wharton,

A key element of your essay is "causal chain". Are there really causal chains? I prefer causal forks like for instance family trees. Maybe you feel in position to refute my conclusions from flaws I am claiming to have found in interpretations of basic mathematics for quantum mechanics.

A fork is like an arrow while Minkowski's cones could be flipped. Could you imagine having exactly one son and one daughter but possibly several mothers and no father at all?

I consider my reasoning very serious and suspect Baez, Wheeler and many others might possibly be fundamentally wrong.

Eckard Blumschein

http://fqxi.org/community/forum/topic/369

response to comments: I mention that time is a coordinate of our space-time universe. What makes this important is that all events (localized reality) must be defined by specific values for all of the coordinates, including time. The concept of past, present, and future is related to the process of physical reality (defined by events) coming into existence by causal chains. In the microworld described by quantum mechanics these causal chains can go equally in both time directions. There is time symmetry and past, present, and future can't be defined in terms of time progression. Only in the macroworld where causal chains are restricted to moving forward in time can we associate past, present, and future with a time direction.

The problem with a block universe model is that it is inappropriately taking our understanding of time from relativity theory to argue that there is no process of becoming. My model has a much looser connection between 'becoming' and time, which is an inanimate coordinate. The logic behind a block universe model is scientifically flawed. Its defense must come solely from philosophy. Of course my model is mostly metaphysical as well, but this only reaffirms the philosophical nature of a block universe model.

Response to Prof. Wharton's response:

To someone who was not educated in a world of believers, virtually every sentence of you reminds of a gospel. Is there really for sure a space-time universe?

While I do not object against the possibility to in principle ascribe age and spatial location to a fossil, I consider any future event unreal.

I already got aware of the chicken-egg problem nearly 50 years ago when I dealt with linear relations between quantities like B, H, E, J etc. at university.

What about present, I understand it as a deliberately undecided description which is valuable in social life but not in physics.

You are quite right in that the process of physical reality is a collection of what already happened.

You wrote: In the micro world, described by quantum mechanics, the causal chains can go equally in both time directions. There is time symmetry.

Instead of blindly defending some obviously flawed logic you should be open for the possibility that not just Thomas Gold was wrong when he naively imagined an time-inverse anti-world. Incidentally, Gold was correct when he criticized in 1947 the passive TW model of cochlea.

Meanwhile, even Prof. em. Zeh, who does not question so far decoherence, wrote a blog you should read.

Eckard Blumschein

Wow, I can't believe I managed to miss your papers regarding retro-causal interpretations of QM, Prof. Wharton.

This time last year I was busily scouring the web for some sort of known disproof for this, not because of the backward causation model specifically, as I had already known of it and it's... uh, useful validity at describing the effects.

It is because I was pondering a similar question you asked in this paper: http://arxiv.org/html/quant-ph/9810060, in which you wrote the following;

"Einstein, as a realist, would probably not have objected to this interpretation. I do not know if Einstein ever considered the possibility of backward causation."

Now, I must clear the air and be honest. I am not in college, nor have I been, I'm just a curious autodidact who was dismayed to find that there were two working theories of the Universe as a child.

I was amazed at the implications of QM, but Special and General Relativity clicked with me immediately, and I've since spent much of the last 20 or so years pondering this unsettling situation with physics.

Last year, as I said, I was struck by an odd thought while casually going over the Abraham-Lorentz equations on Wikipedia, I love encyclopedias, and the note about "pathological pre-acceleration solutions" which I had always glossed over stood out.

I was also reading the page on Gravitational Redshift... and it hit me that Einstein knew GR utterly denied non-locality as a possible explanation for QM, it not only would allow backwards causation, it implied an even weirder concept.

Extended causal interaction, where an object with very low mass could "observe" an extended series of events as simultaneous. It could even interact with them broadly relative to our intuition of simultaneity, "now", or causality.

Then I found the spot where Albert played the role of a little dutch boy, and quietly stuck a finger into the dike holding this idea at bay.

From: http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Gravitational_red_shift

"Since the rate of clocks and the gravitational potential have the same derivative, they are the same up to a constant. The constant is chosen to make the clock rate at infinity equal to 1. Since the gravitational potential is zero at infinity"

It hit me, which experiment shows that the rate at infinity, and thus one could infer the rate at which a massless object interacts with time, was as set here?

I've yet to find one, and the only reason I can find for this value to be chosen is that it preserves causality as we know it.

If the maximum manner an object with any mass can interact with time, it's all good.

If that Rate = 1 point were to occur at a non-zero mass though? What do you get if it continues to increase at lower masses? R > 1 would be almost like the inverse of the time dilation observed for massive bodies, wouldn't it?

It is dreadfully difficult to find anyone to discuss this with, much less a Professor with an interest in pursuing a resolution to the mismatch with GR and QM, even if it means losing some sense of causality.

I have a short paper I wrote presenting this idea: On the Temporal Interactions of Quantum Bodies, the name being a sort of homage to Einstein's 1905 paper on SR, of course.

I wrote out a longer (rambling >.

Oops, post got cut off.

I wrote out a longer (rambling >.

Well, I seem to be artificially ending my post somehow...

Either way, thank you for the time it took to read that, it is somewhat frustrating trying to get in touch with those within academic circles when you are not in them yourself. I must admit I would be extremely excited at the possibility of discussing this with, not just a Professor, but one with similar intuitions about Relativity being correct, and an interest in adjusting causality.

I'll be looking for more of your work to read, if you're interested I have a somewhat embarrassingly rambling paper I wrote about this that I like to call Simply Relativity.

If I'm correct and you can express extended temporal interaction this way through GR, then something that acts like QM "falls out" into your lap, so everything would be Simply Relativity.

Thank you for your time.

Max Morriss

simply.relativity@gmail.com