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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 JoeMerchant on Saturday July 08 2017, @12:55PM

    by JoeMerchant (3937) on Saturday July 08 2017, @12:55PM (#536509)

    And, isn't this coming down to semantics, anyway?

    Whether something is retrocausality or action at a distance would seem to just be two ways of explaining the same phenomenon.

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