Retrocausality

[SalixIncendium]

"Quantum physics has spawned its share of strange ideas and hard-to-grasp concepts - from Einstein’s “spooky action at a distance” to the adventures of Shroedinger’s cat. Now a new study lends support to another mind-bender - the idea of retrocausality, which basically proposes that the future can influence the past and the effect, in essence, happens before the cause."

A new quantum theory predicts that the future could be influencing the past

A link to the study:

http://mattleifer.info/wordpress/wp-content/uploads/2016/08/Foundations20160717.pdf

In quantum theory, can future events influence the past?

 

[74x12]

"Quantum physics has spawned its share of strange ideas and hard-to-grasp concepts - from Einstein’s “spooky action at a distance” to the adventures of Shroedinger’s cat. Now a new study lends support to another mind-bender - the idea of retrocausality, which basically proposes that the future can influence the past and the effect, in essence, happens before the cause."

A new quantum theory predicts that the future could be influencing the past

A link to the study:

http://mattleifer.info/wordpress/wp-content/uploads/2016/08/Foundations20160717.pdf

In quantum theory, can future events influence the past?

Maybe. Interesting because I believe time travel is probably possible. However it's limited in my opinion because the Sovereignty of God. Meaning you can't change what God won't allow to be changed.

 

[Sunstone]

I suspect the significance here applies only events on the quantum level -- if the notion turns out to have any merit at all.

However, my fancy can't resist the urge to imagine that -- assuming that at least one or two of the various accounts of people seeing the future in dreams or visions are true -- the notion of retrocausality in physics might give us a hint that if such dreams and visions are true, they have natural explanations.

 

[Twilight Hue]

"Quantum physics has spawned its share of strange ideas and hard-to-grasp concepts - from Einstein’s “spooky action at a distance” to the adventures of Shroedinger’s cat. Now a new study lends support to another mind-bender - the idea of retrocausality, which basically proposes that the future can influence the past and the effect, in essence, happens before the cause."

A new quantum theory predicts that the future could be influencing the past

A link to the study:

http://mattleifer.info/wordpress/wp-content/uploads/2016/08/Foundations20160717.pdf

In quantum theory, can future events influence the past?

I don't see how.

 

[Polymath257]

Whenever I see this type of thing, I worry that the person involved is attempting to use classical ideas about particles, etc and trying to explain quantum phenomena from that viewpoint.

In this, the issue seems to be the desire to keep 'realism'. In this context, realism means that things have actual properties that are present even, for example, when we don't look at them. So, for example, the spin on an electron comes from some underlying properties that are 'real' and 'always there'. This is directly against what quantum mechanics says. In fact, QM fairly specifically allows for indeterminate states where many different possible measurements could be seen and there are only probabilities that can be predicted for which one actually happens.

So, in this paper, the desire to keep realism is part of what is responsible for the consideration of retrocausality. This is in spite of the fact that QM is inherently non-causal and non-realist.

Now, the fact of the matter is that we don't understand why time symmetry is broken. Why is it that causality goes one direction and not the other? At the most fundamental level, most of the physical laws are time symmetric, but not all of them. In particular, the weak nuclear force violates time symmetry. But, at the macroscopic level it is rather easy to see a direction of time. Unfortunately for this paper, that difference in the macroscopic level appears to be related more to entropy considerations than anything more fundamental.

At this point, let's keep this idea as a possibility, but I'm not taking it seriously until a LOT more work is done.