Can the future affect the past?

According to Quantum Mechanics future can affect the past.
There are many names for this “QM weirdness”; retro-causality, time flying backwards and so on…

Experiment Shows Future Events Affect The Past

There are just as many interpretations of this supposed weirdness that QM presents scientists with…Some say that we don’t know enough about TIME…Others say there is no such thing as time; at least on quantum level…

Though initially opposed or uncomfortable to with the problems QM presented him with, Einstein, just before he died, made the following statement about TIME itself.

Einstein once wrote, in a letter to comfort the widow of a recently deceased friend, “Now he has departed from this strange world a little ahead of me. That means nothing. People like us, who believe in physics, know that the distinction between past, present, and future is only a stubbornly persistent illusion.”

Why would Einstein write such a letter if the great majority of his lifework were dependent on the existence of time?

But, that is not the motto of my OP,  though I realize that I have raised enough red flags for some to go on for a long time…

A while back, my older son asked me a question:

Why would a loving God destroy everyone but Noah and his family in the global deluge?

I may have answered this question somewhat, but I don’t think it really satisfied him…
A few days back I was researching another theme for my work and came across the QM experiments that indicate that the future can, and does affect the past…And it hit me like bolt of lightning! If our future events affect the past, God can access the future and perform acts of justice based on the future events… Noah’s Flood is no different…

After that my son even found some evidence that the Canaanites were given warnings by God/prophets, hundreds of years in advance to change their behavior or… they were going to be exterminated…

I love quantum mechanics… The more I learn about quantum mechanics, the more I’m in awe about it and whoever purposed it…It does serve an amazing purpose…

BTW: The more I learn about QM and subatomic world, the more I don’t like the ID term for the design movement thingy… I don’t know why…I’d like Purposeful Design much better…

105 thoughts on “Can the future affect the past?

  1. This is one of my 50 favorite subjects…
    First of all, I would like to thank the admins for doing a much better job than in the past… They are not perfect and they shouldn’t be…
    So, I thank you for doing this difficult job… and, yes, managing me, among others, who have, and should have something to say…
    Some people won’t like it what at say, but that is just fine…

  2. Time is not a persistent illusion. Human error is persistent.
    A loving God destroyed all humans in the flood because they were all evil. All murderers.It was his action movie. All bad guys were killed and deserved it.
    In Gods world YES Time is weird. god predicts the future very well. So either he predicts future events of TIme is static in some weird way.
    This is beyond QM though.
    I question we have the smarts to do these concepts when we can’t fix almost anything in the body.
    Just the most simple stuff was done first.

  3. Can the future affect the past?

    I believe the technical name for this is “historical revisionism”. And there’s actually a Wikipedia entry under that name.

    Why would a loving God destroy everyone but Noah and his family in the global deluge?

    Why do otherwise intelligent humans take an obvious fictional story, and pretend that it is history?

    I love quantum mechanics…

    I tend to be a skeptic. I’m not denying QM. But I am skeptical of interpretations.

  4. Neil Rickert: Why do otherwise intelligent humans take an obvious fictional story, and pretend that it is history?

    Think about the spontaneous origins of life… You might get a point…

    Otherwise it’s simply Optimism Bias… In other words, you assume that your nonsense is better than someone else’s…
    Your bias is simple: You choose to believe one nonsense because you assume that the other option is nonsense…

    That’s optimism bias at its best…

    BTW: One simple guy once said that even Noah’s are were ever found matching the description from the Bible, it wouldn’t have any effect on people like you…

    He also said, that if Jesus were to comeback, he’d be killed by his own people…

  5. Neil Rickert: I tend to be a skeptic. I’m not denying QM. But I am skeptical of interpretations.

    This puts you in the category of …… who can’t be pleased no matter what interpretation…

  6. Robert Byers:
    Time is not a persistent illusion. Human error is persistent.
    A loving God destroyed all humans in the flood because they were all evil. All murderers.It was his action movie. All bad guys were killed and deserved it.
    In Gods world YES Time is weird. god predicts the future very well. So either he predicts future events of TIme is static in some weird way.
    This is beyond QM though.
    I question we have the smarts to do these concepts when we can’t fix almost anything in the body.
    Just the most simple stuff was done first.

    I usually refuse to get into these kinds of exchanges of thoughts…However, since some have accused me of cutting some bloggers off too early and assigning them appropriate names when due to nonsense, I think we all have a great opportunity to contribute here and resolve some of the nagging issues…

    According to Robert “…A loving God destroyed all humans in the flood because they were all evil. All murderers.It was his action movie. All bad guys were killed and deserved it…”.

    I guess that means that children and infants were also guilty of being murderers and evil…

    So, we are presented with this phenomenon, and I would like not only Bob, to contribute to this discussion of how a loving God could destroy even children in the global deluge…

    My view on the issue was presented in the OP…

    Let’s hear from others, other than Neil…obviously, who already stated clearly, which nonsense he is willing to support…

  7. ”And it hit me like bolt of lightning! If our future events affect the past, God can access the future and perform acts of justice based on the future events… Noah’s Flood is no different…”

    So much for the free will idea.

  8. Acartia:
    ”And it hit me like bolt of lightning! If our future events affect the past, God can access the future and perform acts of justice based on the future events… Noah’s Flood is no different…”

    So much for the free will idea.

    Why do you say that?

    I’d thought about it many times and I’m aware that we may not have 100% free will in some sense…
    For example, if Jesus’ enemies had had 100% free will, they could have prevented Jesus from being born, or to sacrifice his life on the day of Passover… or the Earth could be destroyed beyond recovery by a nuclear war…

    and so on…

    So in that sense we don’t have 100% free will…but I don’t think it is the same thing as accessing some slice of spacetime by means of QM or dark energy…or some other means…

  9. Neil Rickert: I have no idea as to how life originated.

    What evidence convinced you that life was NOT created then, if you have no idea how it originated?

  10. J-Mac: What evidence convinced you that life was NOT created then, if you have no idea how it originated?

    Weird!

    Is “originated” supposed to imply “not created”?

    However I should correct my earlier comment. I have not ruled out the possibility that there was always life, in which case I suppose “originated” is the wrong term.

  11. Mung: Yes. God.

    It can’t be God…. Let me correct myself. It can’t be God at least in Neil’s world view, even if he accepts that there was always life…

    At least Neil shouldn’t have a problem accepting that there was something without a beginning…

  12. Neil Rickert: Weird!

    Is “originated” supposed to imply “not created”?

    However I should correct my earlier comment.I have not ruled out the possibility that there was always life, in which case I suppose “originated” is the wrong term.

    Oh boy!!!
    Silent sigh…

  13. J-Mac: I’d thought about it many times and I’m aware that we may not have 100% free will in some sense…
    For example, if Jesus’ enemies had had 100% free will, they could have prevented Jesus from being born, or to sacrifice his life on the day of Passover… or the Earth could be destroyed beyond recovery by a nuclear war…

    Free will problem, SOLVED.

    Onward and upward, baby!

  14. According to Quantum Mechanics future can affect the past.

    QM does not say that.

    Actually, QM is not very clear about what it says about reality; it’s a very abstract mathematical theory, and it’s not at all obvious how the abstractions that appear in QM connect up to reality. The various “interpretations” of QM are essentially different proposals for how the math of QM might relate to reality.

    Very few of the interpretations of QM say that the future can affect the past. In fact, the only one that I’m aware of that says this is the transactional interpretation. All of the others explain phenomena like this without any sort of backward-in-time causality.

    (Well, ok, that’s a slight oversimplification, since some interpretations involve faster-than-light causality, and if relativity is right, FTL forward-in-time causality is the same as FTL backward-in-time causality in another reference frame, and all reference frames are equally correct. But this is still not equivalent to strict backward-in-time causality. Under relativity, it’d be more accurately described as sideways-in-time causality.)

    So how do various interpretations explain the results without backward-in-time causality? Well, let me run through it for a few of them. I’ll use the original version of Wheeler’s delayed choice experiment, which uses photons (the new experiment you linked uses helium atoms). The short summary of the experiment is that a photon is run through a beam splitter (a half-silvered mirror), then after that you can either measure which side it came out (i.e. whether it reflected off the mirror or passed straight through, like a particle would), or you can recombine the beams through another beam splitter, and interference between the two beams will cause it to all come out one the same direction from the second “splitter” (essentially, the second splitter acts as a merger), indicating that the photon went both ways like a wave. For a more detailed (/better) explanation, see the Wikipedia article.

    Anyway, the basic idea is that by choosing what to measure after the photon is past the beam splitter, you can appear to retroactively control whether it went both ways or just one at the beam splitter. But there’s no reason to think this “appearance” of backward causality actually corresponds to reality. More specifically, measuring the photon on one side or the other of the beam splitter doesn’t mean it actually went just that one way at the beam splitter. If the photon had gone just one way, you’d only measure it in one place, but the converse does not logically follow; just because you measured it on only one side doesn’t mean that’s the only way it went.

    So with that preface, let’s look at what happens under some interpretations. Copenhagen interpretation (with objective collapse) first: under this interpretation, the photon’s wave packet splits and goes both ways at the splitter; if one of the partial-packets hits a detector, it’ll collapse, with one or the other partial packet vanishing. But the collapse is not retroactive at all. Up to that point, the photon was split between both paths; it’s only from that point on that point forward that the photon is on only one of the two paths. On the other hand, if you don’t measure which path it’s on, the two parts of the wave packet recombine at the second splitter (/merger), giving the expected wavelike results.

    How about the de Broglie-Bohm interpretation next. This interpretation says that “particles” actually consist of both a particle (which has a definite position, and thus follows definite paths) and a “pilot” wave that influences the path of the particle. Under this interpretation, when the photon hits the splitter, the particle part goes one way or the other, while its pilot wave goes both ways. If you measure which way the particle went, the pilot wave essentially decoheres, and the part that went the other way winds up not influencing it anymore, so it winds up acting as though both particle and wave went just that one way (even though the wave actually went both). On the other hand, if you recombine the beams, the wave guides the particle which direction to go at the second splitter (/merger), giving the expected wavelike results.

    Now let’s do the many-worlds interpretation. In this interpretation, the photon’s wave packet splits at the first splitter. If you measure which way it went, the photon becomes entangled with the measurement apparatus (and probably you, when you look at the measurement, etc). Because of all the entanglement, it becomes effectively impossible to ever get the two parts of the packet (and all their entangled partners) back together again to interfere with each other, so you can’t detect that both parts of the wave packet still exist; instead, they go their separate ways and act effectively like different worlds. On the other hand, if you don’t interact with the beams before they recombine at the second splitter (/merger), they do recombine cleanly and you get the expected wavelike results.

    So which of these interpretations is correct? We don’t know; it could be any of them, or one of the other interpretations I haven’t mentioned, or even something nobody’s thought of yet. Lots of people have lots of opinions, but we don’t really know.

  15. For those who care:
    The philosophical implications of Einstein’s view that the passage of time is an illusion and that the past, present and future all exist, rob us of free will…

    I didn’t come up with this idea… and for what it’s worth, I don’t even hold this view…

    I can accept that time is an illusion because on subatomic levels it seems not to exist ,but not that the future has already been written in the stone…

    But hey! That’s me….

  16. J-Mac: At least Neil shouldn’t have a problem accepting that there was something without a beginning…

    If your god can exist without a beginning, why can’t the universe? I mean, what’s the specific reason for that? Other then you endowing your god with the property that it does not need to be created or have a beginning.

    Heads you win, tails you redefine winning.

    I’m not actually asking this question. Many people have wasted many years pondering such nonsense. We are here. There is no evidence for your or any other deity. That is all.

  17. Can the future affect the past?

    Give me a couple days and I’ll get back to you.

  18. J-Mac: The philosophical implications of Einstein’s view that the passage of time is an illusion and that the past, present and future all exist, rob us of free will…

    Only if philosophy has implication about the real world.

  19. J-Mac: So in that sense we don’t have 100% free will…

    So, god killed countless humans (men women, children) because he could see what they would become. But if he could see what they would become, none of them has any free will to change the course of their lives.

    I

  20. Acartia: So, god killed countless humans (men women, children) because he could see what they would become. But if he could see what they would become, none of them has any free will to change the course of their lives.

    I

    Your conclusion is obvious but only from a linear concept of time…

    God is timeless…

  21. Neil Rickert: Only if philosophy has implication about the real world.

    You don’t think Einstein’s theories have implications of the real world?

  22. Mung:
    Can the future affect the past?

    Give me a couple days and I’ll get back to you.

    Mung,
    Please check out my comment to Acartia above…

  23. Gordon Davisson,

    Unfortunately, I have to admit that Gordon Davisson’s comment is the only comment about the OP that is readable… He actually read the OP and some materials that are actually related to the theme…
    I guess I have to thank you Gord…
    Thanks again!

  24. J-Mac: You don’t think Einstein’s theories have implications of the real world?

    Actually, they don’t.

    Einstein’s theories have implications about the best way for us to understand the real world. But the world keeps on doing what it is doing without paying any attention to Einstein’s theories.

  25. Neil Rickert: Actually, they don’t.

    Einstein’s theories have implications about the best way for us to understand the real world.But the world keeps on doing what it is doing without paying any attention to Einstein’s theories.

    No? Well, try to remember what you just wrote next time you fly or use GPS when driving…

  26. J-Mac: Your conclusion is obvious but only from a linear concept of time…

    God is timeless…

    Well, ain’t that convenient.

  27. J-Mac: Well, try to remember what you just wrote next time you fly or use GPS when driving…

    Those have to do with how humans (engineers) use Einstein’s theories. That’s different from the question of the implications of the theory itself.

  28. J-Mac,

    In addition, the researchers randomly added a second laser grating. They found that when this was present, the atoms created the wavelike interference pattern. When the second grating was not there, the atoms behaved like particles and traveled along a single path.

    Can you explain how the laser grating works?

  29. J-Mac: For example, if Jesus’ enemies had had 100% free will, they could have prevented Jesus from being born, or to sacrifice his life on the day of Passover… or the Earth could be destroyed beyond recovery by a nuclear war…

    I think you are confusing free will with free action. Nobody has free action. Free will is not “free decision making”. Nobody has free decision making capacity. Both of those things are confined by many factors. What we do have, though, is free will, which is the originating impulse – the loci of directed consciousness – that is then interpreted by the psychology of the personal mind and then filtered through the lens of physical opportunity.

  30. William J. Murray: What we do have, though, is free will, which is the originating impulse – the loci of directed consciousness – that is then interpreted by the psychology of the personal mind and then filtered through the lens of physical opportunity.

    No, we don’t.

    Checkmate.

  31. Out of interest, William, how many alien visitations has your household received so far this year?

  32. If one thinks of time as a 4th physical dimension, then we are not on a trek from “the” past to “the” future at all, but rather just going from one location to another. In simulation theory, the “progress” of the world one experiences is really the ordering of the simulation according to the mind of the observer. However, it’s really no different in theory than the changing of the scenery as one drives down the highway – a different landscape unfolds depending on the direction one is going.

  33. William J. Murray: If one thinks of time as a 4th physical dimension, then we are not on a trek from “the” past to “the” future at all, but rather just going from one location to another.

    And yet you insist you have free will in the preceding comment. It’s no wonder you disavowed your own books, you do the same to your comments in the very next one!

  34. Gordon Davisson:

    Nice post, thanks.
    For those interested in a defense of retro causality by a reputable philosopher, here is Hew Price on Retrocausality. No endorsement intended, but in his defense I would say that this likely a simplification of his position to be suitable for Aeon.

    I think one’s view on this issue depends on whether one’s intellectual preferences run to holism/non-locality or to retrocausality. Einstein would not be happy about that dilemma. I think most philosophers today prefer non-locality.

    I am aware that some think MWI avoids the issue of non-locality since that interpretation denies the assumption in Bell’s proof that only one outcome of the experiment occurs. But there is an issue in MWI of branch-relative locality, I believe. Plus the issue of whether taking the universal wave function to be the basis of all reality is any better than non-locality with a less abstruse view of ontology.

  35. William J. Murray: I think you are confusing free will with free action. Nobody has free action. Free will is not “free decision making”. Nobody has free decision making capacity.

    Free will: “the power of acting without the constraint of necessity or fate; the ability to act at one’s own discretion.”

    Mr. dictionary appears to disagree with you.

  36. Acartia: For those who twist reality to justify their belief in a mythical deity.

    Reality? As you see it? Or as you would like it to be?

  37. William J. Murray: I think you are confusing free will with free action. Nobody has free action.Free will is not “free decision making”.Nobody has free decision making capacity.Both of those things are confined by many factors.What we do have, though, is free will, which is the originating impulse – the loci of directed consciousness – that is then interpreted by the psychology of the personal mind and then filtered through the lens of physical opportunity.

    I’m confused…
    Who or what is making the decision to write back to you now?

  38. Mung: As if it had any choice.

    The past has not happened…really… until it has be registered….
    Have you registered yet what walto and ketihs are saying?

  39. J-Mac: Reality? As you see it? Or as you would like it to be?

    Nope. As we observe it. Feel free to provide observations that support your mythical creature.

  40. Acartia: Nope. As we observe it. Feel free to provide observations that support your mythical creature.

    Why? Would that change your mind?
    Don’t waste my time, please!

    Evolution is observable though… I saw a dog jumping into the lake and I think he will not be coming back…I think he wants to be a whale… as he should… but the observation of that change is conveniently buried in the so-called trial and error of millions of years of hellevolution…

    Can you imagine what would happen if the universe turned out to be a few billion years younger? It can be if relativity is wrong…I would like to see the day of truth: cosmologists vs evolutionists…
    It’s coming…it’s inevitable… The Planck Probe brought data that contradicts the big bang model… at least the random one… So no matter what cosmologists want to believe, either way it is not a materialistic universe… not the one atheists would like it to be…

  41. J-Mac: I usually refuse to get into these kinds of exchanges of thoughts…However, since some have accused me of cutting some bloggers off too early and assigning them appropriate names when due to nonsense, I think we all have a great opportunity to contribute here and resolve some of the nagging issues…

    According to Robert “…A loving God destroyed all humans in the flood because they were all evil. All murderers.It was his action movie. All bad guys were killed and deserved it…”.

    I guess that means that children and infants were also guilty of being murderers and evil…

    So, we are presented with this phenomenon, and I would like not only Bob, to contribute to this discussion of how a loving God could destroy even children in the global deluge…

    My view on the issue was presented in the OP…

    Let’s hear from others, other than Neil…obviously, who already stated clearly, which nonsense he is willing to support…

    Often God destroyed the kids/infants because of a evil, accusation.
    The children easily are evil unless very very young.
    So really its infants/young children that would seem to have not been evil as not having free will and ability to choose between options.
    Well Gods point always was the infants would not be any different once grown. there were no infants on the ark.
    So the infants really are ALREADY evil in their very essence. the bible says we are conceived in evil. that means at conception we are already in evil. guilty.
    there is no way to stop ourselves. the infants would never be otherwise then the adults. in fact infants are all evil and some adults, NOAH, could choose to not be evil.
    The infants would go to heaven anyways as people without responsibility
    I see it as reasonable to see the infants as evil in their very essence.

  42. Robert Byers: So the infants really are ALREADY evil in their very essence.

    With or without religion, good people can behave well and bad people can do evil; but for good people to do evil — that takes religion..

  43. J-Mac: I’m confused…
    Who or what is making the decision to write back to you now?

    Not sure what your confusion is. The willful impulse to respond precedes the decision to respond (because you can also decide to not respond based on various reasons – the system of thought in your mind that examines the impulse), and decide how to respond based on what tools are available and you deem appropriate. All of those things are “you” – the impulse, the decision, the action, but they usually proceed in that order. Only the “will” is free – you can have the will to do something that seems impossible (as many innovators have done in the past), even if at that time you do not have the ability to choose to do it right then nor the ability to carry out that decision even if you chose it. You’d have to make a different decision if you want to eventually be able to have the ability to actually do the thing in question – like learn how, or develop the technology to be able to do it in the future.

    Free will is not the same as “free decision making” or “free action.”

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