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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: 1) by Zobeid Zuma on Sunday July 09 2017, @02:02PM
I'm no physicist and not expert on this subject, but... I don't understand why it isn't perfectly natural for cause-and-effect to work in both directions. Why is this even a subject of debate?
Here's an example of what I mean: Decay of an unstable isotope. This is usually regarded as a randomly occurring phenomenon, with a statistical likelihood of the atom decaying during a given time frame (as described by its half life). But the decay event itself has no preceding cause. It's spontaneous, right? Yet, if we follow the timeline in reverse, it becomes obvious why the decay had to occur at the point in time and space that it did: because that's where the spray of decay products originated from! It's the point where their paths intersect. Thus, the decay seems to me like a perfect example of an event with its "cause" in the future.