Does Time go Backwards?

This is a clear cut question to quite a few people. And, their answer perhaps would be that you are asking a wrong question. Instead, they would suggest to ask, “Why does time not go backward?” There are quite a few physicists who believe that the arrow of time cannot be reversed; one of the contemporary ones among them would be Stephan Hawking. I think even the big dog aka Einstein believed that you cannot go back in time. According to him to travel back in time, you will have to travel faster than light and that is not possible.

But since the topic of this thread is in the form of a question (“Does Time go Backwards?”), we will make an impartial effort to explore the other possibility without being biased by the opinions of heavyweights.

Philosophers are a group of people who give the idea of traveling to past serious thoughts. There is a concept in philosophy called retrocausality which seeks to answer questions like, “Can the future affect the present?” Retrocausality takes into consideration the possibility of time travel particularly to the past. Although this is purely a thought experiment but it is not entirely based on imagination. On the contrary, it is based on some solid physics.

Two famous physicists who are strong supporters of retrocausality are John Wheeler and Richard Feynman.

Richard Feynman devised a diagram which is called Feynman Diagram to intuitively explain what is otherwise a very complex mathematical formula conceived by Paul Dirac which lead to discovery of positrons later. Feynman envisioned that positrons are nothing but electrons going back in time. This diagram became very popular among theoretical physicists who were working in the field of Quantum Field Theory.

279px-Feynmann_Diagram_Gluon_Radiation.svg.png


Feynman diagram - Wikipedia the free encyclopedia

Coming back to the retrocausality, the only credible proponent of time travel to the past, is quite complex. I do not think anyone has touched it since Richard Feynman and John Wheeler. I personally think it should get a lot more attention than it is getting now not just for the sake of possibility of past time travel but to explain many strange phenomenon associated with Quantum Mechanics.
 
I think the causality condition--that a phenomenon cannot go "back in time" and influence or annihilate its own cause--strictly limits any such instances of "retrocausality".

It may be just another spooky consequence of quantum mechanics, which has already given us the wave-particle duality, quantum entanglement and the like.
 
Let me forward you the memo :)

Time is affected by both gravity and speed. When the gravity increases, time starts to slow and when the speed increases, time starts to slow.
 
Gee whiz, perhaps we can reach the point of the Roman parties, and really revolt the fundies. When they are sneaking in the back door to join the party.
 
Time going backward on a quantum scale? Might be a real interesting concept to explore.

The distance between the entangled particles does not seem to matter. You can take one of the entangled particle to the space station and leave another one on the Earth. But as soon as you observe the state of one of the particles the other one knows about it. The thinking is that this information is conveyed instantly but due to our limitations in measurement, we have so far recorded that the information between the entangled particles travels more than 10 times the speed of light. This is why Einstein together with Podolsky and Rosen created the famous thought experiment called EPR Paradox to prove inadequacies of Quantum Mechanics. But it looks like this is one of the rare moments where Einstein was wrong. I think Quantum Mechanics is here to stay. Not only that it is set to revolutionize our computing techniques through new algorithms that are being developed in Quantum Computing.
 

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