A Growing Number of Scientists Are Convinced the Future Influences the Past

[Javaman]

https://www.vice.com/en/article/epvgjm/a-growing-number-of-scientists-are-convinced-the-future-influences-the-past

Have you ever found yourself in a self-imposed jam and thought, “Well, if it isn’t the consequences of my own actions”? It’s a common refrain that exposes a deeper truth about the way we humans understand time and causality. Our actions in the past are correlated to our experience of the future, whether that’s a good outcome, like acing a test because you prepared, or a bad one, like waking up with a killer hangover.

But what if this forward causality could somehow be reversed in time, allowing actions in the future to influence outcomes in the past? This mind-bending idea, known as retrocausality, may seem like science fiction grist at first glance, but it is starting to gain real traction among physicists and philosophers, among other researchers, as a possible solution to some of the most intractable riddles underlying our reality.

In other words, people are becoming increasingly “retro-curious,” said Kenneth Wharton, a professor of physics at San Jose State University who has published research about retrocausality, in a call with Motherboard. Even though it may feel verboten to consider a future that affects the past, Wharton and others think it could account for some of the strange phenomena observed in quantum physics, which exists on the tiny scale of atoms.

“We have instincts about all sorts of things, and some are stronger than others,” said Wharton, who recently co-authored an article about retrocausality with Huw Price, a distinguished professor emeritus at the University of Bonn and an emeritus fellow of Trinity College, Cambridge.

More at link

[Throck]

1. The invention of the flux capacitor?

[brush]

2. Right. Retrocausality has been done.

[hunter]

3. I figure if you could go anyplace or anytime in the universe by some magic (which you can't)...

... it looks pretty much the same as you see it now. The "past" looks the way it does from our perspective because that's the way it has to look by our interpretation of time/space. If "time travel" and "faster-than-light" travel are impossible in this universe (they are the same impossible thing in my opinion) then we can only see the stuff that is relevant to our own situation in the universe and all that relevant stuff seems to condense down to that single point we call the "Big Bang." That doesn't necessarily have to reflect the actual nature of the universe, if there is any, it's just appearances. The universe only looks 13.78 billion years old from where we are fixed. That's the only frame we can observe.

When I'm not wandering off like a crazy man with my own speculations, I'm rather fond of John G. Cramer's transactional interpretation. He explains the "spooky action at a distance" of quantum physics with waves that travel backwards in time.

[JustFiveMoreMinutes]

4. Doesn't exist until it's observed

Isn't that one of the ideas of physics/particle physics?

If that is true... wouldn't the causality of coming into existence necessitate the processes/beginnings of it should create a 'wave into the past' to create the conditions which formed the observation?