The Destiny of the Universe

How can there be something in the future(which as not yet occured,and thus has no time signature) that can influence the present_time, the now, when all evidence is that all the "nows" have most definately been influenced by events of/from the Past?

Any retro_causal tachyonic_quantum sidestepping signal system, must bypas the present time and influence the past. prior to event occuring at the now moments!...which still will be past causations, viewed from the now moment observer?

I don't quite get this sentence: "In some cases, the observed deflection during the intermediate step can be amplified by a factor of 10,000, depending on choices made in the final step." This looks like a handwaving argument designed to grab publicity.

So what if you get the amplification, and then decide NOT to do the final step?

Does anyone know of the appropriate achive papers on this?

To be honest this sounds questionable. There is an idea I have from this borrowed from Feynman. Feynman proposed that the path of a particle weaves all around space and time, even backwards in time. The thought occurred to me that maybe there are only one of each type of particle in what ever group there is which describes particle physics. So an electron being shoved through a semi-conductor chip in you computer is the same as an electron in a charge separation current generating a quasar jet --- and every other electron as well. So the difference between the earliest state of the universe and the final state of the universe might then just be some unitary operation, or some quantum information preserving transformation.

Cheers LC

Fixing link:

Time, Change & Self Organization

Some thoughts muddling up my head, with minimal coherence:

I tend not to see time as a cause, but an effect, so the notion of the future affecting the present or past isn't really coherent. It's more a question of emergence, as in what patterns are we missing which will manifest as events evolve. Is there some whole that is not apparent in the sum of the parts, at least those measurable? In a sense, can the chicken be predicted from the egg. In a political sense, what we see as that negative feedback loop of collapsing probabilities be missing some larger positive feedback loop in which the current state of chaos is a form of logical pattern. Order emerging from the chaos of collapsing order.

As for the tests described, it seems a variation on the "spooky action at a distance" phenomena, but rather than entangled particles affecting each other at the same moment, it's whether the events of a particle can reach back and affect prior actions of the same particle. I think this raises the question of just what is light and energy. Is it these individual points, or is there some larger field effect, such that the same field is being tested and setting parameters of the rest of the field. Dunno. Better get back to actual work and not keep goofing off.

Clearly the intermediate measurement is unavailable to the experimenter until after the final step is performed. Otherwise this wouldn't be much of a finding, would it?

Tom,

Make that the negative feedback loop of collapsing structure, as the three dimensional space contracts into the gravitational vortex of receding events. With the positive feedback loop of the expanding continuous energy of future potential.

Sorry, couldn't resist.

hmmm, well I can't speak for the science aspects of this, however, as a philosopher, this would be more upsetting than Darwin on more paradigm than one from a philosophical POV.

So the universe may be Teleological? wow. clearly self reflecting, self teaching, self referencing intelligence would play a unique role in such an environment.

Karl,

I don't get your argument either. Why are the intermediate experiment results not available at that time? The way that I understan this dual state/time approach to QM is that it does not obtain anything else except the standard predictions of QM. And one of this predictions is non-signaling. The way the sentence is written in the article, it seems to imply a violation of non-signaling. That it why I asked if anyone has the appropriate achive papers to take a closer look at their claims. I smell a rat here.

droid,

More Aristotelian than Platonic. The problem with monotheism is that it makes the assumption the absolute, the universal state, is an ideal, but it is elemental, so a spiritual absolute would be the essence from which we rise, not an ideal from which we fell.

So it would be something of a blind teleology. Striving for the purpose of striving, rather than attaining any particular goal, as anything attained is simply a marker to be surpassed. Thus blind energy moving from one event to the next, as this perceived structure recedes into the past.

Each generation serving as first model, then foundation for the next. Occasionally though, the whole structure giving away under accumulated expectations and a new operating system has to be built, allowing more degrees of freedom, but less leverage to work with.

Happy $th! Damn! Make that happy 4th!

Then after manymanymany generations of this building up/forward, falling back/down the folding action turns single celled organisms into multi-celled ones. Now we are trying to repeat on a species level what nature created on the organism level hundreds of billions of years ago. The current build out is due for a break down, but eventually humanity may be the biology evolving a central nervous system to a planetary organism. That's sort of what I mean by does the egg understand it is to be a chicken.

Florin -- I just meant that (I assume) the experiment is set up so that the experimenter does not know the result of the intermediate experiment until after the final step. If he/she did, then we wouldn't infer anything interesting from correlations between the final step and the intermediate measurement. (I think.)

I believe the article refers to experiments conducted by John Howell's group at the University of Rochester:

Starling, D. J., Dixon, P. B., Jordan, A. N. & Howell, J. C. Phys. Rev. A 80, 041803(R) (2009)

Dixon, P. B., Starling, D. J., Jordan, A. N. & Howell, J. C. Phys. Rev. Lett. 102, 173601 (2009).

You can get the articles here:

http://www.pas.rochester.edu/~jhgroup/papers/starling-pra-09-10.pdf

http://www.pas.rochester.edu/~jhgroup/papers/dixon-prl-09-04.pdf

Here is a link to a summary of the work in Nature:

http://www.nature.com/nature/journal/v463/n7283/full/463890a.html

The tie-in to time reversal and retrocausality is discussed in the Discover article linked from the "Destiny of the Universe" article above.

.

The question may be: "What is the Universe?"

Is our neighborhood the entire stuff?

Once from a supposed nothing, nothing could have started, the universe had not beginning. If it had no beginning, that is its real nature: energized matter.

So, why thinking it will have any end? Until proof in contrary, it is eternal.

If an idea violates causality, it is probably a non-starter.

Thank you for the links. The experiments are very interesting. But the claims of "The Destiny of the Universe" are just bogus.

Here is te main review paper on all this:

http://arxiv.org/abs/quant-ph/0105101v2

Haven't read the above review paper yet, but at first this seems to be a kind of "delayed choice" set up? The results of these sorts of experiments, originally devised by John Wheeler to show that there is no reality until a conscious observational choice is made, can easily be explained by the David Bohm interpretation of quantum mechanics. In that view there is no "weirdness" or mystery, no "backwards in time" causation. It also derives all of the results of standard QM, is arguably simpler and certainly not as weird as the idea being proposed in this article!

This article seems reminiscent of an earlier blog which addressed speculation that current operations at the Large Hadron Collider are being sabotaged by physicists from the future. (And, btw, how can we get back to that earlier blog? I don't see any obvious link to it.) It's my recollection that the earlier piece flogged this horse nearly to death, but it probably lacked a discussion of the recent, alleged experimental "evidence" of future influence over the past.

That serious people can be having what pass for serious discussions about the "future" influencing the "past" reflects a serious lack of understanding regarding the fundamental nature of time. What we perceive as "the flow of time" is, in reality, nothing more and nothing less than the evolution of the physical universe, a view which leaves scant opportunity for a non-existent configuration of the universe (i.e., "the future") to influence anything.