The Destiny of the Universe

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.

Here is a nice and clear explanation by Sandu Popescu of what is going on here :

http://physics.aps.org/articles/v2/32

Causality is not violated because post-selection happens after the middle weak measurement. And while thinking that the future affecting the past may simplify the analasys, there are highly non-trivial efects in the standard analasys which get hidden, like the existence of super-oscillations: an oscillation of a band-limited function which oscillates faster than its fastest Fourier mode. It all boils down on realizing that weak measurements are not measurements in the normal sense with a link between values and probabilities. In fact weak measurements can even be imaginary and are the effect of averages on the post-selected ensamble.

I disagree with both Sandu Popescu and the author of the paper. Instead of imagining future influences on the past, I think a more fruitful approach is to consider violations of Bell and Tsirelson bounds and clarification of the measurement problem in the mezoscopic domain (i.e. emergence of real measuremet values in strong mensurements from weak measurements featuring complex and values larger than the largest eigenvalue)

I never thought that weak measurements at all implied backwards causality. The value of observable under a weak measurement increases as the pre and post selected states become orthogonal. So the Hardy result of permitting an electron and positron to interfere in a beam splitter is possible as the non-annihilation probability is amplified in this way. The freedom to rotate the pre and post selected states does indeed produce overlaps which are imaginary valued.

This only has something to do with future outcomes maybe in the sense of the Wheeler-Delay Choice experiment. The apparent interference between the pre and post states can be seen I think as a WDC experiment type of thinking.

What Florin indicates here are states which are in between being pure or entangled states and states which are the outcome of measurements. There is this "nether world" in between the two, which may have some relationship to weak measurements.

Cheers LC

WDC, like the 2-slit experiment on which it is based, concerns the path of a single particle. Both 2-slit and delayed choice, then, deal with particle-like properties of the interference pattern.

When we speak of future events meeting present events, we want to stay in the domain of wave-like properties, where the interference patterns (and therefore particle superpositions) are preserved in a 2-point n-dimensional relation. In my model (my "time barrier" paper, eqn 5*) partial order in the moment (the least-time state) is represented by the asymmetry of gravitating bodies -- i.e., the projected area around each point, based on the difference in escape velocities, differs by a slight but nonzero amount. Because escape velocities carry unique values in the gravity field and continuously change with the spacetime field, the field interference patterns maintain continuously changing superposition in a combined field on orthogonal axes.

In general relativity, the state of the spacetime field determines the strength of gravity ("space tells matter how to move"), while matter is at relative rest in the field ("matter tells space how to bend"). In "The relativistic theory of the non-symmetric field" (The Meaning of Relativity, Appendix II, Princeton 1956) Einstein writes, "It does not seem reasonable to me to introduce into a continuum theory points (or lines, etc.) for which the field equations do not hold. Moreover, the introduction of singularities is equivalent to postulating boundary conditions (which are arbitrary from the point of view of the field equations) on 'surfaces' which closely surround the singularities. Without such a postulate the theory is much too vague." What I've done is to project on the Riemann surfaces closely surrounding the singularities (2-point boundary) a time-dependent area which I find does not commute between points, making the time metric n-dimension continuous.

This result suggests that the spacetime field and the gravity field are independent and orthogonal, though combined -- like the electric and magnetic fields.

Tom

*Correcting error in notation: Eqn 5 E_v should be V_e

Tom,

I got here a bit late so I can't write too much. The gravity field has analogues of the electric and magnetic fields. The coordinate and momentum metrics are conjugate in the same way that D and H fields are conjugate. There is likely a departure, for coordinates also do not commute, so there is an extended noncommutative C* system.

More later

Cheers LC

Lawrence,

Let's see if we can find a classical physics example. Suppose we pre-select all attempted conquests of ancient Rome. Then we post-select the cases where the attacker reached Rome but his conquest route was 100% blocked by the Roman armies. Then we ask for the middle measurement: which route did the invading army took? So what we have? We got Hannibal and his Alps crossing. He got from state |A> = attack Rome at time t_1 to state |B> inside the Italian peninsula but with all known paths blocked at time t_3 and = 0 and at time t_2 he was crossing the Alps (weak measurement with amplified values.) But is this proof of backward causation, or of future affecting the present? Not at all. The only valid conclusion is that if you want to transition between near orthogonal states, you need to do things out of the ordinary, or think/act outside the box.

Aharonov's basic equation is: A_w = / and the amplification happens when = almost zero because of the very small denominator.

Let's have another example: . = nearly zero. Let A=a qualifier-type problem. Now pre-select all PhD physics graduate students and post select all Nobel Prize winners. Then one would expect unusually brilliant solutions of the qualifier-type problems for Feynman and others in their graduate student years. And indeed, this is what it happens on average for most of the Nobel prize winners early in their career. But can we conclude this is evidence of the future (winning Nobel prize) affecting the past (a brilliant solution for qualifier-type problems)? No. This is no guarantee of success; it is only a pre-requisite. And here lies the fault of the argument of Aharonov, Davis, and Popescu. Amplified weak measurements are only a pre-requisite of the evolution toward a final orthogonal state, and not a guarantee. There is no destiny at work here.

Let's try this post again with greater then and smaller than signs replaced by paranthesis...

Lawrence,

Let's see if we can find a classical physics example. Suppose we pre-select all attempted conquests of ancient Rome. Then we post-select the cases where the attacker reached Rome but his conquest route was 100% blocked by the Roman armies. Then we ask for the middle measurement: which route did the invading army took? So what we have? We got Hannibal and his Alps crossing. He got from state |A) = attack Rome at time t_1 to state |B) inside the Italian peninsula but with all known paths blocked at time t_3 and (A|B) = 0 and at time t_2 he was crossing the Alps [weak measurement with amplified values.] But is this proof of backward causation, or of future affecting the present? Not at all. The only valid conclusion is that if you want to transition between near orthogonal states, you need to do things out of the ordinary, or think/act outside the box.

Aharonov's basic equation is: A_w = (Future|A|Past)/(Future|Past) and the amplification happens when (Future|Past) = almost zero because of the very small denominator.

Let's have another example: (Future| = (Nobel Prize|. |Past) = |graduate student). (Nobel Prize|graduate student) = nearly zero. Let A=a qualifier-type problem. Now pre-select all PhD physics graduate students and post select all Nobel Prize winners. Then one would expect unusually brilliant solutions of the qualifier-type problems for Feynman and others in their graduate student years. And indeed, this is what it happens on average for most of the Nobel prize winners early in their career. But can we conclude this is evidence of the future [winning Nobel Prize] affecting the past [a brilliant solution for qualifier-type problems]? No. This is no guarantee of success; it is only a pre-requisite. And here lies the fault of the argument of Aharonov, Davis, and Popescu. Amplified weak measurements are only a pre-requisite of the evolution toward a final orthogonal state, and not a guarantee. There is no destiny at work here.

I think there's a bit of conceptual misunderstanding of what one can expect from the back-reaction of future events to present. One is not saying that the present is determined by the future, such that predictions for present states become exact. One is saying that the present is partially ordered, such that assuming least-action, the probability field is restricted to a known or arbitrarily chosen future state. An example of a known future state would be a folded protein (cited in my ICCS 2007 paper linked earlier).

In the Aharonov-Vaidman paper that Florin earlier linked, the authors take a quantum theory approach with a 2-state vector system, and derive classical time symmetry. In my preprint, "on breaking the time barrier" I take a classical approach with a 2-point boundary value, and derive quantum time asymmetry. One should think that these theories are dual, because one would find that the asymmetry my theory predicts for four dimensions is very tiny, and quantum time asymmetry is only apparent in d > 4.

Tom

Aren't D and H fields empirical? My memory is dim on this. What I have in mind, at any rate, is a field conjugation that gives us a direct relation between the classical "corkscrew" path of time and the tensor metric. I know -- that's badly stated; the formalism I imagine, however, should very well show us the restricted domain of future events, even though the range is infinite.

Tom

Hi,

My feeling is that what we take as "the universe" is just our close neighborhood and that the 'cosmic fabric' is as infinite in time as in space.

His nature is being 'energized matter' and no end is available to that (no start, no end).

Accepting this apparently absurd idea seems to be the solution...

Cheers,