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from the will-this-help-me-win-the-lottery? dept.
A team in Australia turned thought experiment into lab reality by using lasers. Their subject matter was not a photon but a helium atom. The lasers they used served as a pair of grates, one before the other, with the second grate randomly dropped in.
What they found is weirder than anything seen to date: Every time the two grates were in place, the helium atom passed through, on many paths in many forms, just like a wave. But whenever the second grate was not present, the atom invariably passed through the first grate like a particle. The fascinating part was, the second grate's very existence in the path was random. And what's more, it hadn't happened yet.
In other words, it was as if the helium particle "knew" whether there would be a second grate at the time it passed through the first.
Also covered at: phys.org. An abstract is available; full report is pay-walled. The original news article is at Australian National University
Original Submission
(Score: 0) by Anonymous Coward on Tuesday June 23 2015, @01:03AM
I make it a point to sit down right next to certain people. No wonder the place is deserted, I could already sense the razor-sharp defensive spines, this heap of human preferred his personal space on the scale of rooms and had covertly scrutinized my actions from the moment I stepped in. Why was he even here? A dozen meters away from a never-ending stream of people?
“Hello”
No reaction, yet had it been possible the gap between us would have expanded at lightspeed. My neighbor would slam through the wall at the end of the bar counter, the wall he sat next to, and off into a dimension of his own.
He looks in my general direction, nods hello, tries to classify me once again, ready to attack.
Such attacks seldom happen to me, instead and after the customary period of silence what happens is this.
“They're all wrong you know”
“About what?”
“Time travel”
“Yeah?”
“Grandfathers and paradoxes and killing Hister. It's all nonsense”
“…”
“You don't go backwards like that, you go backwards like forwards”
“What do you mean?”
“When you go backwards nothing at all happens to the you that travels from the future, nothing at all, nada, you don't travel at all or you can't tell you did. Everything happens to the you back then”
I don't say it. If I say it I might as well not have bothered and left him alone without this peculiar kind of torture. Levity kills. He's not looking for sympathy or approval or any social trapping, and least of all scorn and ridicule.
“Remember r, always remember r”
He pauses and drinks a little in our bubble of calm. His defensive systems are back to passive mode. Is that all? Remember r? What is r? I try to make myself disappear in the hope of more.
“You remember the future, that's what happens. You remember the future. You know something that is going to happen. Perhaps something you did but not yet. But you don't know why. You don't know how. You don't know when. You don't know where the memory of the future starts or stops or what is fantasy or how much your inner gecko is trying to help you out or if you've become insane or whether how much or if the future really is that bad or why it isn't impossible to die that many times in what seems such a short time and why the infantry charge is going up the side of the abyss in the deep-water trench or why you see them and their blazing guns and the supercavitational steam from front on. But it has the feeling of memory. Every time, for every slice of future”
He looks me directly in the eyes for what seems like eternity compressed, then he looks at the people streaming past beyond me in the transit lounge. The debriefing is complete.