We've been taught our consciousness -− and everything else in the world -− flows like an arrow in one direction from the cradle to the grave. But an amazing set of experiments suggest the present and the future are entangled, and that events in the future may influence things happening in the world now.
Since this sounds absurd, let's go straight to an actual experiment published in 2002. Scientists showed that pairs of particles could anticipate what their distant twins would do in the future. They stretched the distance one of the photons took to reach its detector, so the other photon would hit its own detector first. The photons taking this path already finished their journeys -− they either collapse into a particle or don't before their twin encounters a scrambling device. They decided this before their twin ever encountered the scrambler. Somehow, the particles "knew" what the researcher would do before it happened.
We, of course, live in the same world. Does this experiment suggest your unborn child could influence what's going on next to you right now?
In the mid-30's, physicist Erwin Schrödinger, upset about the implications of quantum theory devised a thought experiment to try to reveal the absurdity of applying quantum reality to the ordinary world. He imagined a closed box containing a cat and a radioactive source. If a detector registers a radioactive particle, a poison gas is released and the cat dies; if not, the cat lives. The detector is turned on so there's a 50-50 chance the radioactive source will emit a particle. If quantum reality is applied to this experiment, neither of the possibilities open to the radioactive source, and therefore to the cat, has any reality unless its observed; that is, the atomic decay has neither happened nor not happened, and the cat is neither dead nor alive until we look inside the box to observe it. One might say the cat exists in an indeterminate state until it's observed.
Ironically, although Schrödinger devised this experiment to reveal the absurdity of applying quantum notions to the everyday world, many scientists believe Schrödinger's conclusion is an appropriate analysis of the cat's (or our) predicament. Some object on the grounds it's non-deterministic -− Einstein's quotes "God does not play dice" and "Do you really think the moon isn't there if you aren't looking at it?" exemplify this. In response, the great Nobel laureate, Niels Bohr said "Einstein, don't tell God what to do."
Recent experiments suggest Schrödinger's "absurd" conclusion may be right. Zeilinger's work with huge molecules called buckyballs pushes quantum reality into the macroscopic world. In an exciting extension of this work -− proposed by Roger Penrose, the renowned Oxford physicist -− not just light, but a small mirror that reflects it, becomes part of an entangled quantum system, one that's billions of times larger than a buckyball. If the proposed experiment confirms Penrose's idea, it would furnish the most powerful evidence that biocentrism -- that is, the biocentric view of the universe -− is correct at the level of living organisms.
In a 2007 experiment, scientists shot photons into an apparatus and showed they could retroactively change whether they behaved as particles or waves. The particles had to "decide" what to do when they passed a fork in the apparatus. Later on, the experimenter could flip a switch. It turns out what the observer decided at that point determined how the particle had behaved at the fork in the past.
You may be wondering, "What's this got to do with me?" Consider a modification of Schrödinger's experiment. Replace the radioactive source with an entangled particle in the measuring device. If the detector registers a particle, the poison is released and the cat dies. Now put your cat in the box with lots of food and water. By activating a scrambling device in the path of the particle's twin (like in the 2002 experiment described above), you'd have the power in the future to decide whether or not Paws lived or died in the past.
If biocentrism is correct, future experiments will confirm the world is indeed influenced by the future. The past, present and future are inseparably entangled. Spinoza's genius sensed this back in the 17th century. To be conscious of space and time, he explained, is to transcend them. The mind transcends space and time in the sense that they're for it and it's not in them. Consciousness can't exist simply in space and time, and at the same time be aware of the interrelations of all parts of space and time. In order to have knowledge of objects, it must somehow be part of them.
Eminent Princeton physicist John Wheeler (who coined "black hole") insisted when observing light from a distant quasar bent around a galaxy, we've set up a quantum observation on an enormously large scale. It means, he said, the measurements made on incoming light now, determines the path it took billions of years ago. This mirrors the results of the actual quantum experiment described above, where an observation now determines what a particle's twin did in the past.
In 2002, Discover magazine sent a reporter to the coast of Maine to speak to Wheeler firsthand. Wheeler said he was sure the universe was filled with "huge clouds of uncertainty" that haven't yet interacted either with a conscious observer or even with some lump of inanimate matter. In all these places, he said, the cosmos is "a vast arena containing realms where the past is not yet the past."
This logic applies not just to events that took place billions of years ago. What you do today could influence past events -- say, at the building of the Great Pyramids, the birth and death of Christ, or landing on the moon -- or events that will occur millions of years in the future when the Sun's dome obscures the heavens.
As The Time Traveller in H.G. Wells's story pointed out, our ideas about time are founded on a misconception.
The Time Traveller was not there. I seemed to see a ghostly, indistinct figure sitting in a whirling mass of black and brass for a moment... It may be that he swept away into the past...Or did he go forward...? (H.G. Wells, "The Time Machine")
What would The Time Traveller find? It may depend on what you do after reading this article. And BTW, make sure you don't let your cat out of your sight.
Biocentrism (co-authored with astronomer Bob Berman) lays out Lanza's theory of everything.
Follow Robert Lanza, M.D. on Twitter: www.twitter.com/RobertLanza
Robert Lanza, M.D.: Why You Will Always Exist: Time Is 'On Demand'
Biocentrism (cosmology) - Wikipedia, the free encyclopedia
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If time is merely a measurement, and the past exists just as the future exists, than couldn't causality go both ways?
How do we don't we didn't come from the big bang, but the big bang came from us?
I'm certainly not a believer in linear time beyond our interpretation of it, but I don't understand why this concept suddenly seems to assume the experimenter is removed from the past event even while using the same experiments that have previously proven he isn't.
In the last century Einstein posited that time is different for objects which are traveling at different speeds. It seems that speed and gravity were very important considerations to Mr. Einstein's way of thinking. Perhaps we will see more developments in the near future expanding our understanding of physics, and perhaps some of those new developments will affect the way we understand and use the concept of time.
Discoveries in science three hundred years ago allowed for the invention of the coal powered steam engine, which started the Industrial Revolution, which has led us to make monumental changes to the nature of our own atmosphere.
Discoveries in physics in the first half of the 20th century allowed the development of nuclear bombs, weapons so destructive that we now have the power to make ourselves effectively extinct with just the push of a button.
It would be interesting to be a cosmic fly on the wall, watching to see if we manage to avoid causing our own destruction with the fruits of our science.
I think the scientists just cannot measure the activity quick enough and think they are seeing something-or I think they are seeing something since they have not condensed from their cloud of probabilities. In the end, these people contribute nothing to science nor our lives while they get paid to write this tripe instead of doing basic research. Since that is what I am thinking, does that make it so?
In my experience, the future, present and past can interact in ways that enable the future to be changed. I do not understand it, but I refuse to reject the evidence of my senses.
There have been hypotheses that some subatomic particles may not always follow the everyday, commonly accepted rules of action within the dimension of time.
Here's an example of how future events determine/create the past:
Everything we don't observe is a wave of probabilities. Suppose my cousin calls from place A at 10:50 to tell me he just left and is driving to pay me a visit. It takes 2 hrs to drive from place A to my home. The probability's the he'll be here at 12:50. I'll only know how long it took him by recalling the past once he gets here. At the point, I'm creating the past in order to determine not only how long it took him to get to my place, but also other circumstances which brought him to arrive at the time he did.
In reality my cousin wasn't here. He appeared. There was a change.
Future events determine the past.
All this to say that time, like space, is a tool to comprehend reality.
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Not so. It's just that because we haven't made the observation, all we have to work with are the probabilities. This is something every poker player knows.
He can't see his opponents cards. He can only make guesses about the probability of one hand or another. Some players, like Daniel Negreanu, have uncanny abilities in this area.
But what doesn't happen - ever - is that someone's read actually changes the cards in his opponent's hand.
You could devise a Schrodinger's Cat type of experiment with a pair of dice in a sealed cube, with a camera inside the cube. Shake the cube, and then guess what you've rolled with the dice. If you were a craps player, your guess would be probability based.
A picture could be snapped of the dice - or not. But nothing about you as observer would actually change what you had rolled.
http://www.fourmilab.ch/rpkp/
It's about time. (he he he)