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Thiotimoline, Anyone?

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

mcgrew writes:

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.

Original Submission

 
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  • (Score: 3, Disagree) by wonkey_monkey on Saturday July 08 2017, @08:37PM (4 children)

    by wonkey_monkey (279) on Saturday July 08 2017, @08:37PM (#536632) Homepage

    Biochemist Dr. Isaac Asimov was joking, of course, when he came up with the substance

    Haha, yes, of course he was. Sorry, what?

    I don't think Asimov's oeuvre has quite pervaded the global consciousness as much as you think it has.

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  • (Score: 2) by mcgrew on Sunday July 09 2017, @02:36PM (3 children)

    by mcgrew (701) <publish@mcgrewbooks.com> on Sunday July 09 2017, @02:36PM (#536834) Homepage Journal

    Anyone who hasn't read Asimov can hardly consider himself a nerd. The joke was the original article about the fictitious substance that was written as if it was a real scientific paper.

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    • (Score: 3, Touché) by wonkey_monkey on Sunday July 09 2017, @07:55PM (2 children)

      by wonkey_monkey (279) on Sunday July 09 2017, @07:55PM (#536899) Homepage

      Anyone who hasn't read Asimov can hardly consider himself a nerd.

      Well, maybe not a pompous nerd, anyway.

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      systemd is Roko's Basilisk