Our website would like to use cookies to store information on your computer. You may delete and block all cookies from this site, but parts of the site will not work as a result. Find out more about how we use cookies.

Login or Register

Powered by
Powered by Novacaster
 
Time-symmetric QM again
by Simon at 22:12 23/08/11 (Blogs::Simon)
"...And yet, as crazy as it sounds, this notion of reverse causality is gaining ground. A succession of quantum experiments confirm its predictions—showing, bafflingly, that measurements performed in the future can influence results that happened before those measurements were ever made."

From http://discovermagazine.com/2010/apr/01-back-from-the-future/article_view?searchterm=Tollaksen&b_start%3Aint=0

(Note for interested readers: the theory of time-symmetric QM first emerged in 1964)


--
simon
<< Official Stonehenge Guidebook,... Round and round the Bulford St... >>
View Comments (Threaded Mode) Printer Version
Time-symmetric QM again Simon - 22:12 23/08/11
Re: Time-symmetric QM again Bruce Ure - 12:04 29/08/11
This is TOO fucking weird!

--

Re: Time-symmetric QM again Simon - 20:39 29/08/11
Might not be as weird as you imagine ;-)
--
simon
Re: Time-symmetric QM again Steve - 00:57 08/09/11
So if I'm reading this right, one of the experiments involved taking a reading of a laser light either once or twice. And if you did it twice then the first reading was affected by the first.

So somehow the fact that you're going to actually do the second reading becomes known in advance to the particles and they respond accordingly even before the event has happened?

In which case I agree with Bruce. This is just too fucking weird. Expanded to the human scale, it would be like saying we've no free will since future events are influencing the past somehow. But, oddly, there's something comfortingly familiar about it because it gives you the feeling that all the decisions you made were the correct ones. But if you're someone who likes the idea of being in control of your decisions then perhaps not so comforting.

Strange physics.

--
stevepa

Re: Time-symmetric QM again Simon - 17:50 08/09/11
Strange indeed - but once you get around the idea that effects can flow 'backwards' in terms of our perception of the flow of time it makes perfect sense.

Well, for suitably uncertain values of 'perfect' :)
--
simon