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Biochemist Dr. Isaac Asimov was joking, of course, when he came up with the substance (it came up in his orals for his doctorate, and it terrified him), but some theoretical physicists have suggested that something similar to Asimov's fictional chemical actually exists at the quantum level.
Phys Org reports that "Physicists provide support for retrocausal quantum theory, in which the future influences the past."
(Phys.org)—Although there are many counterintuitive ideas in quantum theory, the idea that influences can travel backwards in time (from the future to the past) is generally not one of them. However, recently some physicists have been looking into this idea, called "retrocausality," because it can potentially resolve some long-standing puzzles in quantum physics. In particular, if retrocausality is allowed, then the famous Bell tests can be interpreted as evidence for retrocausality and not for action-at-a-distance—a result that Einstein and others skeptical of that "spooky" property may have appreciated.
It's a long and informative article that I found fascinating.
(Score: 5, Funny) by NotSanguine on Saturday July 08 2017, @08:08AM (3 children)
Time flies like an arrow.
Fruit flies like a banana.
No, no, you're not thinking; you're just being logical. --Niels Bohr
(Score: 2) by c0lo on Saturday July 08 2017, @08:34AM (1 child)
If times fly like an arrow, why can't a fruit fly get its banana back if it gets past the horizon if a black hole?
(if time is reversible in the laws of physics, how come a photon reflected on a mirror beyond a black hole's horizon can never get back outside?)
https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=aoFiw2jMy-0 https://soylentnews.org/~MichaelDavidCrawford
(Score: 2) by pvanhoof on Saturday July 08 2017, @08:51AM
The photon keeps falling back unto the mirror. Time dilation (or, gravity) is too big for the photon to escape sufficiently far to reach your eyes (which are on the other side of the horizon). Not sure if time must be irreversible or reversible for that to happen either way.
but .. IANAP
(Score: 4, Informative) by maxwell demon on Saturday July 08 2017, @10:00AM
I couldn't get time flies to check your first claim, but my fruit throwing experiments at least confirmed your second claim: There's indeed no substantial difference in the flying between bananas and other fruits. ;-)
The Tao of math: The numbers you can count are not the real numbers.