The "Jello" Block Universe

[numan]

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You are who you are not just because of what happened in the past, but also because of what is happening in the future.

The April, 2010 edition of Discover magazine has an article about the future influencing the past; experimental confirmation of this fact has finally been achieved:

Back from the Future

The Rochester experiments demonstrate that actions carried out in the future ripple back in time to influence and amplify the results measured in the earlier, intermediate step....

You cannot perceive the information that controls the particle's present behavior because it does not yet exist.

I am pleased that the world is finally beginning to catch up with my ideas.

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[numan]

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The nature of time is very different from what humans have traditionally believed. Among early civilizations time is almost universally compared to a flowing river. The "Now" has usually been conceived as where You, the Observer, are standing on the bank of the river.

When Einstein came up with the Special Theory of Relativity he realized that it precluded the existence of a single Now for all observers. One of the grossest violations of physical law in science fiction stories is when an interstellar spaceship uses a hyper-light communications system in order to talk to someone who is now on Earth. Even if instantaneous communication were possible (which, by the way, it is not), there is no single "Now" shared by both the spaceship and planet Earth. Depending on the velocity of the spaceship, it would be in contact with different "nows" on Earth.

Such considerations led Einstein to the notion of the so-called "block universe": a static, four-dimensional space-time structure in which the subjective flow of time was an illusion.

Einstein's conception was only partially correct, and was wrong in a fundamental way. Quantum mechanics makes the block universe untenable. The irreducible non-locality of information in Einstein-Podolsky-Rosen experiments causes the block universe to be riddled with mutability as quantum wave functions collapse.

John Wheeler came up with a good example: Imagine a distant galaxy acting as a gravitational lens with reference to a yet more distant galaxy directly behind it in the line- of-sight from earth. Imagine that there is a fifty percent probability that a photon from the more distant galaxy will pass on the left side of the lensing galaxy and a fifty percent probability that it will pass on the right side, and be so registered on a photographic plate billions of years later on earth. This enormous indeterminacy in the path of the photon will remain unresolved for billions of years until the collapse of its wave function on earth!

The Einstein block universe fails to have a completely deterministic structure. Another clue to the nature of time is in the theory of "advanced waves" in electromagnetic theory. This notion was first developed by Richard Feynman and John Wheeler in the 1940's, and later taken up by a number of other people.

These discoveries lead to the metaphor of the "jello block universe", a block universe in which "information", like vibrations, passes back and forth, up and down through the dimension which is called "time", causing the condensation and collapse of quantum wave functions into definite events.

In this view, the ultimate history of the universe is as yet only partially determinate and will reach its final state only when the jello has finished vibrating. The universe thus has no absolute history, but, within limits, is the summation of very many alternate histories.
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[numan]

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Einstein's "spooky action at a distance", and quantum correlations in general, are similar to what happens in a rug or membrane which is warped.

There is a bulge in the rug; you press it down with your foot and "it" pops up again in another part of the rug. The bulge has not travelled from point A to point B; rather, strains have passed through the entire fabric of the rug [which represents all of Minkowski space-time, from distant past to distant future, in this metaphor].

These strains sum to create a new bulge which preserves certain features of the original bulge. [In the case of an electron which "travels" from A to B, those features are spin, mass and charge]
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[numan]

'
In Minkowski space-time. an observer's space-time location will depend critically on his state of motion.

The extreme case is that of a photon, which, travelling at the speed of light, sees time in the external universe reduced to a single instant, so that absorption takes place instantaneously after emission. It is freed from the illusion of time. The birth of a photon takes place at the same moment as its death, though an observer in the poky, slow-moving frames of reference that are normal for Earthlings may see the photon moving a great distance over many years.

This due to the fact that space-time measurements involve complex numbers, not old-fashioned, mere real numbers. Photons, travelling at the speed of light, cover zero space-time distance in their lives, even though observers in non-relativistic frames of reference may see them move very far in space and in time.

This is yet another example of the facts which inexorably drove Einstein and Minkowski to realize that we inhabit a block-universe.
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[asaratis]

Determinations in the future can affect one's perception of what happened on the past, but as applies to Las Vegas...what happened in the past stays in the past. You cannot unring a bell. You cannot change what happened in the past. Nothing that happens in the future will change what has happened in the past...macro, micro, quantum or whatever.

So sayeth the Lord!

 

[numan]

You cannot unring a bell. You cannot change what happened in the past. Nothing that happens in the future will change what has happened in the past...

So sayeth the Lord!

Except, it appears that you are wrong !!

Consider : Back from the Future

“Nature is trying to tell us that there is a difference between two seemingly identical particles with different fates, but that difference can only be found in the future,” he says. If we’re willing to unshackle our minds from our preconceived view that time moves in only one direction, he argues, then it is entirely possible to set up a deterministic theory of quantum mechanics....

...while many of Aharonov’s colleagues conceded that the idea was built on elegant mathematics, its philosophical implications were hard to swallow....
Through the 1980s and 1990s, Tollaksen teamed up with Aharonov to design such upside-down experiments, in which outcome was determined by events occurring after the experiment was done....

The Rochester experiments seem to demonstrate that actions carried out in the future—in the final, post-selection step—ripple back in time to influence and amplify the results measured in the earlier, intermediate step....

Why must the quantum world always retain a degree of fuzziness when we try to look at it through the time slice of the present? That loophole is needed so that the future can exert an overall pull on the present, without ever being caught in the act of doing it in any particular instance.

“The future can only affect the present if there is room to write its influence off as a mistake,” Aharonov says.

emphasis added

Peek-a-boo, I don't see you!! · ·

By the way, better not bring religion into this. You are just setting yourself up for another Church-Galileo débâcle !!
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[numan]

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An article from the New Scientist magazine about weak measurements:

Curiouser and curiouser

Although Aharonov has been working on weak measurement for 15 years, his confidence has recently grown enormously....

The result of this work is "strange and surprising", Aharonov says, but shows quantum theory to be logical and self-consistent. Weak measurement, he believes, will be the tool that finally opens up the weirdness of quantum theory for inspection....

...when you get a look inside, quantum theory is even more bizarre than we thought. Quantum particles can assume far more complex identities than simply being in two places at once: pairs of particles are fundamentally different from single particles and they can assume a negative presence....

Eventually, Aharonov believes, weak measurement may dispel all our present notions of the weirdness of the quantum world. Aharonov claims that when the Nobel laureate Richard Feynman famously pronounced that we can never truly comprehend quantum mechanics, he was "too hasty". "I think people will remove the mystery that Feynman said could never be removed," he says. "You should never say never."

emphasis added
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[numan]

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In the Oct. 2010 issue of Discover, theoretical physicists Stephen Hawking and Leonard Mlodinow state :

"There is no way to remove the observer -- us -- from our perceptions of the world ... In classical physics, the past is assumed to exist as a definite series of events, but according to quantum physics, the past, like the future, is indefinite and exists only as a spectrum of possibilities."

If the quotation is accurate, I must congratulate Stephen Hawking for seeing what I realized some 30 years ago. Better late than never, Stephen!

Both energy and time are not well-defined below the level of the Planck Constant of action. The temporal indeterminacy is usually very short, from our macro viewpoint -- but not always!!

It is well known in physics that the Planck Energy [square-root(h-bar x c^5/G) =1,956,330,837 Joules] is the highest energy theoretically possible in a single, well-defined quantum interaction. Few people have considered the question of what is the lowest possible energy. Yet it is obvious that this energy is equal to h-bar divided by the Hubble-age of the universe: ~1.845 x 10^-52 Joules. Apart from a geometrical factor, the ratio of these two energies equals the square root of the information content of the visible universe out to the event horizon at this particular epoch: 1.124 x 10^122 bits of information.

The entire physical history of the universe up to the present epoch may be regarded as the superposition of 1.124 x 10^122 quanta of the lowest possible energy. Multiplying the number of bits by the mass-energy of each lowest energy quantum, by an amazing "coincidence" we get very closely (or exactly) the sum total of the mass of the observable universe.

Since the time-uncertainty of each of these quanta extends back to the Big Bang, every single aspect of the history of the universe may, potentially, be modified. In practical terms, only the universe itself is capable of modifying its entire history. Even quite minor modifications of the past require the coordination and resonance of a stupendous number of such low-energy quanta.

This is the real reason why time travel is impractical, in the sense of transferring large quantities of Shannon-type information.
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