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posted by mrpg on Saturday July 08 2017, @07:30AM   Printer-friendly
from the the-future-was-yesterday dept.

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.


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  • (Score: 2) by c0lo on Saturday July 08 2017, @08:34AM (1 child)

    by c0lo (156) Subscriber Badge on Saturday July 08 2017, @08:34AM (#536472) Journal

    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?)

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  • (Score: 2) by pvanhoof on Saturday July 08 2017, @08:51AM

    by pvanhoof (4638) on Saturday July 08 2017, @08:51AM (#536476) Homepage

    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