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Science hopes to change events that have already occurred

"Ever wish you could reach back in time and change the past? Maybe you'd like to take back an unfortunate voice mail message, or rephrase what you just said to your boss. Or perhaps you've even dreamed of tweaking the outcome of yesterday's lottery to make yourself the winner.

Common sense tells us that influencing the past is impossible -- what's done is done, right? Even if it were possible, think of the mind-bending paradoxes it would create. While tinkering with the past, you might change the circumstances by which your parents met, derailing the key event that led to your birth.

Such are the perils of retrocausality, the idea that the present can affect the past, and the future can affect the present. Strange as it sounds, retrocausality is perfectly permissible within the known laws of nature. It has been debated for decades, mostly in the realm of philosophy and quantum physics. Trouble is, nobody has done the experiment to show it happens in the real world, so the door remains wide open for a demonstration."

"If it exists, the presence of conscious observers later in history could exert an influence on those first moments, shaping the laws of physics to be favorable for life. This may seem circular: Life exists to make the universe suitable for life. If causality works both forward and backward, however, consistency between the past and the future is all that matters. "It offends our common-sense view of the world, but there's nothing to prevent causal influences from going both ways in time," Paul Davies says. "If the conditions necessary for life are somehow written into the universe at the Big Bang, there must be some sort of two-way link."

Link:

http://www.sfgate.com/cgi-bin/article.cgi?f=/c/a/2007/01/21/ING5LNJSBF1.DTL

Blacknad.

Oh, that's brilliant. Nice find.

It also speaks to an atemporal universe, which I like. (What Einstein called a "Block Universe".) Very nice.

w

The the operative words from the article are:

"If retrocausality is confirmed -- and that is a huge if...."

Were it proven possible, and I am open minded to the possibility, you can throw out every single bedrock foundation piece of human psychology, philosophy, and religion. The concept of god(s) goes away completely to anyone that understands the implications.

Heh. How ironic.

I look at this and see how confirmation of retrocausality would confirm so many of the things I've been writing about here on this forum and make God so much more believable to everybody, and you look at it and say that the concept of God goes away.

Wow, Dan, I think I would really, really enjoy drinking a beer and shootin' the breeze with you at a bar somewhere. You and I are two sides of the same coin, we are.

w

The way I read Dan is that it would be future humans who are responsible for events we blame on God at present.

Let me be explicit. It wouldn't matter what Jesus Christ or Buddha or Mohammed or Moses or Mahatma Ghandi did in the past.

Because someone, anyone, in the future could change it.

If you can change the past you can Make Josef Stalin the saviour and Martin Luther King Caucasian.

The are no rules. There is no causality.

I am willing to grant it possible for this to occur at the quantum level. I think it can be simply proven to be impossible at the macro level because if it did ... we would experience it.

Wayne ... if you want miracles ... you'd best pray there is a god and not a lack of causality. The two are polar opposites. And while you can cling to one ... I think neither a satisfactory solution to understanding the universe.

If there is reverse causality, then that speaks to a static time dimension - one that quanta can flow in either direction on. It means the universe is, in fact, atemporal. And if time is just another dimension like length, then one properly equipped in mind and body can sidestep it and exist outside of it. And can also reach in and change things as needed (read as: create miracles).

If the past was changed, how would we know? We remember it as it is now. Our history can never be changed in a way that we can notice.

Quantum fluctuations allow for incredibly unlikely things. The only reason a Ferrari doesn't suddenly pop into existence in my driveway with my name on the pink slip is because it is so incredibly unlikely that we deem it impossible. But it's not really impossible - it's just barely on this side of impossible. So wildly unlikely that the chances are less than 1 in <insert square of the number of quanta in the universe here>. But, if the universe is atemporal and there is a god being who can exist outside of time (and therefore outside of space as we know it) then that being can finetune and make adjustments. He can multiply the loaves and fishes, he can solidify the water under his son's feet. And he can do this through the adjustment mechanism that he built into the whole thing: Quantum fluctuations. And, because he's outside time and this whole universe is accessible to him, he can do it on as many planets as he wants all at the same (subjective, to us) time.

An atemporal universe makes the activities of God do-able. It makes it possible for somebody outside the time dimension to do an infinite number of things at the "same time". Reverse causality would prove an atemporal universe.

He built the world in six days plus a day of rest? Sure, whatever. The term "days" is irrelevant and meaningless. Maybe he came inside and checked it out at six different time coordinates. Then, after a job well-done, he came in a seventh time and experienced it first-hand from inside (a bit of a rest).

It all makes sense, but only in an atemporal self-contained universe.

This is the most exciting research I've seen when it comes to DISproving the IMpossibility of God. It won't prove God exists, but it sure goes a long way towards proving he could.

w

Wayne wrote:
"And can also reach in and change things as needed (read as: create miracles)."

But a god, a deity, does not require that. If it does it becomes just the equivalent to the statement: "What is technically more advanced looks like magic." Your god is reduced to a 23rd century trickster whose gotten bored or lost the knack.

And it is no more likely that someone in the future would use the ability for good than it is that they would use to to buy stock or bet on horses after they knew the outcome.

But Dan, you're still thinking like a time traveler. I'm not talking about a traveler - I'm talking about somebody off the timeline entirely.

God doesn't need to come in and fix something after something has gone wrong. It's all part of the creation of the whole thing. This gives him the ability to fine tune everything as he's making it. He didn't create the universe a long time ago or in the future - those mean nothing. He simply made it, independent of our time, and in the process can reach in and adjust anything along any timeline. He doesn't wait for it to go wrong - it's already in need of fine tuning while he built it.

As for future people coming back and changing things...

If a person in the future reached back and changed a lottery result, then he'd never have to change the result because it will have already come up the way he wanted it.

You know for certain that you'll never go back and make an armored car crash near you last week and dump money all over you because if you were ever going to do that then an armored car would have already done so last week. Maybe it already did crash and dump money on you but you'll go back and keep that from happening because the money brought you nothing but grief, so you've already robbed yourself of the chance for free riches.

Just because you can change the past doesn't mean that you can ever know that the past has been changed. And anybody who changes the past will cease to exist and will be replaced by whoever they became as a result of the change. (Actually whenever somebody changes the past the entire universe would cease to exist and would be replaced by the Universe it became as a result of the change.)

From that standpoint, it could be argued that nobody in the future will ever change the past, because anybody who ever does will not exist when the time comes that they do it. "Hey, look, that die rolled and came up with a 1. I'm going to change it so it came up with a 6." That person will never see the 6. The person who does see it won't know that the result was altered because it wasn't altered - it always came up as a 6. In the timeline where it came up as a 6, nobody goes back and changes it.

One interesting facet to this would be a message transmitted from the future. The sender, having no memory of the message being received, would send it. He would then be replaced by a person in whose world the message WAS received and therefore would never need to send it. (And if he did anyway, then he would be replaced by a person who still hasn't sent it but remembers it being received twice.) The Universe where the message was received would go forth from that point, never to have the message sent. So any message we receive from the future would, by definition, never actually get sent. These would be messages that were never written, from people who will never exist. So, they were never sent even though they were received. Therefore, even if we receive messages from the future, we can still say that nobody will ever send one.

We may build working machines that let us change the past in any way we want, on any scale, at any time, at will. But we'll never, ever use that capability.

Maybe some future practical joker is responsible for getting George W. Bush elected. God knows he shouldn't have been able to do it without some kind of assistance like that. But, now that he's elected, nobody will ever have to arrange for him to get elected. The people who would no longer exist. (And good riddance.)

w

Wouldn't it make logical sense that the present is unalterable by actions done in the past because if you're there to attempt going about doing it, it already failed?

For example, if I go back in time to assassinate Gandhi, I already failed because I didn't do it.

I suppose the essense of my point would be if time travel/alteration did exist, none of us would ever know about it because the change made would always be how it happened.

Seem like cyclical logic? It should.

The god reference fascinates me, because if you think about god enough to reference it, then no one has, or apparently ever will, go back in time to erase it. Why? Because that's not how it is now.

Wayne.
"God doesn't need to come in and fix something after something has gone wrong. It's all part of the creation of the whole thing. This gives him the ability to fine tune everything as he's making it. He didn't create the universe a long time ago or in the future - those mean nothing. He simply made it, independent of our time, and in the process can reach in and adjust anything along any timeline. He doesn't wait for it to go wrong - it's already in need of fine tuning while he built it."

I don't want to harp on this, as it's a science thread, but -
Is this a hypothesis Wayne? If not, you seem to know very well what God can and cannot do, and about what he actually did/does/will do (whatever the tense should be). Do you think your fellow believers believe as you do?

Anyone noted that if you choose to measure the undelayed photon first, you actually predetermine the future? How do you guys feel about predestination? Better than about retrocausality?

Pasti
If you find your way back in this thread to posts from 15th-21st March, you'll see how a discussion on predestination/freewill developed. That doesn't have to be the end of the story though. I stated my conclusion based solely on the current scientific evidence, but science is still in it's infancy, and I have reason to doubt that my conclusion is correct in reality. What's your view?

Well, of course it is. God didn't call me on the phone and tell me his plans.

I think you'll find few theists that would disagree that God has the ability to effect the universe at will, at any time coordinate. And you'll find even fewer who don't believe God created the Universe. In that sense, yes: I would say my fellow believers agree.

If he can affect any time coordinate, that implies that He is unconstrained by time, which implies that He exists in a state outside of time, non-dependent upon the time dimension to which we all are so closely tied.

And if the universe is a self-contained block wherein time is just another dimension, which reverse causality implies, then it becomes much easier to imagine how such a being could fine-tune things by altering them in the block. Doing so from outside the time dimension, there is no saying he did it "before" or "after" or "a long time ago": It was simply done.

So you ask if my fellow believers believe as I do, and I say that my beliefs are completely compatible with the teachings of the Catholic church - so I guess they do. Or, at least, they do as long as they understand the science involved.



Actually, no - that is not correct. You have never seen me state anything that God cannot do. The best you can say is that I've suggested ways in which he might do them. (eg, Reaching in through the quantum fluctuation from outside time and adjusting things so that they come out as desired.) Telling people what God cannot do is the purview of the Fundamentalists who insist that God is incapable of bringing about intelligent life through the process of evolution. It is they who say that all suicides and non-believers go to Hell because God is incapable of showing mercy and deciding for himself. It is they who claim to know the mind of God and so can tell you with such assuredness that homosexuality is a fast road to damnation. I don't do that. I am about finding ways to show that God is possible and that what seems omniscience and omnipotence to us is a defined side effect of living outside out timestream with the ability to reach into it and manipulate quantum fields. Is that how He does it? I dunno. Might he do it that way? Absolutely! And if he does, it wouldn't violate anything we know about science.

Nothing riles me faster than somebody attributing fundamentalist thought processes to me, and that's what you do when you tell me that I know and say what God can't do. I know that's not what you meant, so I'm not irritated - but it sure makes me type fast, hearing stuff like that.

w

Wayne wrote:
"But Dan, you're still thinking like a time traveler. I'm not talking about a traveler - I'm talking about somebody off the timeline entirely."

I'm following you but not agreeing with you.

If the laws of nature allow events in the future to alter events in the past. They will be altered. And they will be altered in a manner that benefits some unless you've seen a dramatic change in human behaviour since I turned off the news.

Wayne wrote:
"God doesn't need to come in and fix something after something has gone wrong. It's all part of the creation of the whole thing. This gives him the ability to fine tune everything as he's making it."

Except that the bible, the basic tenant of your religion specifically states otherwise. It says he makes floods, he kills first born, he knocks down walls, he heals, he turns people into pillars of salt. These are not the actions of someone content to let nature run its course.

Now if you want to say he was an activist up until 21 centuries ago and now only dabbles in the occasional piece of toast or road sign ok but I don't think most Catholics or Protestants would receive much pleasure considering that possibility.

It strikes me that you believe what you wish to believe, disregard the rest, and struggle in the middle. This may work for you, it certainly worked for me for awhile, but I suspect a certain German cleric would take umbrage.

My read Wayne, and I don't intend this to be disrespectful, is that you accept that you have a religion not based upon the supporting pillars of your faith but rather on those few remaining pillars not yet torn down by science to your satisfaction.

Statements such as "it took as long to create the universe as it took" should, I think, be no more satisfying to you than they are to a physicist. For example: I'm not happy with the square root of minus one.

That's an interesting point, but I imagine that they would say that they are causing the effect.

If you throw a crystal wine glass to the concrete floor with great force, is it predestined to shatter? Or did you simply cause a chain of events that is going to include the shattering of the glass? When the glass breaks I don't think you've proven predestiny.

By the same token, when you measure the undelayed photon first, you cause the second one to take on the opposite traits. Is that predestiny or simply a closely controlled cause and effect?

w

It is entanglement. The photon is not given a choice.

Sure. But when they are, the changes will be completely undetectable to anybody living in the timeline. Completely and totally undetectable. So who's to say they ever happened? Eventhe people who benefit from it will never know that they have benefactors in a no-longer existing universe who set things up to make them the richest person in the world. Perhaps Bill Gates is, in some alternity, a wildly intelligent but completely impoverished person. So he creates his time-tailoring machine and changes things so that he becomes wildly successful. To us, Bill Gates is just wildly successful. Nobody changed a thing. Or did they? Or does it matter? No.



Nature doesn't run a course. It exists. It happens to incorporate a dimension we experience as time. He created it, and decided that at certain parts of it he would astound the intelligent creations within it. At other coordinates along the time dimension he would let them wonder. He didn't lose interest, because that implies he was interested at one time and not another. The whole thing exists at once - there is no "time" for him to lose interest. Instead, there are places where he makes amazing things and other places where his very existence is open to debate.



Nothing in science has ever torn down anything in Catholicism. That's part of why I was drawn to that particular faith. Interpretations may need to be adjusted to make way for fact, but those adjustments can only further purify the faith.

You ask me how to know what parts of the Bible are factual and which are allegory. I say that you must err on the side of learning, and as long as you are learning from the lessons therein then it doesn't matter. Of course it matters to you because you live in a binary life where everything must be perfectly defined. It makes you uneasy to consider that there might be things to be learned that can't be measured with a graduated stick.



I'm having a hard time understanding why that statement of mine gave rise to so much ire. Can you tell me how long it should have taken to create the universe? No matter what your answer is I can still ask, "Why did it take so long?" Or, alternatively, I could ask, "What was the rush?" Of COURSE it took as long as it took. That's how long it would have taken, no matter how long it took! So what's the problem? Are you in such a hurry for the Universe to be created? Is the long timeframe of evolution going to make you miss a dentist appointment?

I really don't understand the response I've gotten to pointing out that the anthropic principal applies to the question of why it took so long. It took that long because that's how long it had to take for us to sit here asking why it took that amount of time. Had it taken some other amount of time then we'd be sitting here asking why it took that other amount of time.

Besides, if time is just another dimension as reverse-causality implies, then the universe is a static contruct. How long did it take to build? That question is exactly the same as "What happened before the Big Bang?" or "How long does it take an electron to get from one side of the nucleus to the other?" If something happens outside of time, like the "orbit" of an electron or the goings-on before the Big Bang, or the establishment of the contruct we call the Universe, then how can you answer the question of how long it took? It took zero time, or it took an eternity. Whichever you like. But if you don't like the fact that you and your planet were inserted on the time axis a little too far to the right, then you should take a look at the living conditions further to the left and be glad you didn't have to deal with hot Universe before matter began to form. And be glad you weren't inserted further to the right in a part of the Universe where everything is cold and all the stars have burnt out. Be glad, in fact, that you were inserted into the time axis exactly where you were so that you could sit and complain about it taking so long to come into existence.

w

Wayne

"Nothing riles me faster than somebody attributing fundamentalist thought processes to me"

No, you don't fit the bill for fundamentalism, and I hope your adrenalin dissipated without further ado. Take it easy.

Incidentally, this caught my eye:

"it's already in need of fine tuning while he built it."

Meaning, I suppose, that he was unable to get it quite right with his first shot.

"I really don't understand the response I've gotten to pointing out that the anthropic principal applies to the question of why it took so long. It took that long because that's how long it had to take for us to sit here asking why it took that amount of time. Had it taken some other amount of time then we'd be sitting here asking why it took that other amount of time."

Try this:

What you are saying is that the laws of physics being such as they are, the events since the Big Bang necessarily took the time that they did. No scientist can argue against that. Now, since God, according to your view, chose those laws of physics, the time taken is precisely as He intended.

Is that accurate?

Not at all what I'm saying. Let's say you build a car. You have exact plans and you know exactly how it has to be and you can get it right the very first time because you're the best car builder that ever was.

Part of your plan is to make the fuel line curve just so around the doohickey on the flimmajamma.

So you build your car, careful to get just the right curve of fuel line around the doohickey to avoid flimmajamma problems.

Is that a fine tuning? Yes. Did you get it right the first time? Yes. Does the fact that you had to go in and curve it just right mean that you made a mistake? No.



That is exactly what I was trying to say. Thank you for putting it more eloquently than I.

w