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Retro-Causality at the University of Washington
The news for today here in Seattle has everything to do with the subjects we’ve been discussing lately. Which is weird because we have been discussing some weird topics. It seems that professor John G. Cramer at the University of Washington is attempting to go somewhere where we’ve all been before: the past. I’ll let the Seattle PI fill you on some of the details:
If his experiment with splitting photons actually works, says University of Washington physicist John Cramer, the next step will be to test for quantum “retrocausality.”
That’s science talk for saying he hopes to find evidence of a photon going backward in time.
“It doesn’t seem like it should work, but on the other hand, I can’t see what would prevent it from working,” Cramer said. “If it does work, you could receive the signal 50 microseconds before you send it.”
Without delving into all the technical or scientific details, Cramer is devising an experiment to test out whether or not this really does work - even if it shouldn’t. In classic fashion, the newspaper exclaims, downplaying the important part and hyping the technocratic part: “Besides altering our concept of time, the signaling finding alone would almost certainly revolutionize communication technologies.” Right, like altering how we experience fucking TIME (!!!) wouldn’t be as important as making new products to sell!
More weird than anything though is that Cramer is also a sci-fi author. Not that that’s so weird in and of itself, really, but the article ends with him proclaiming: “If this experiment fails in reality, maybe I’ll write a book in which it works.” Which if that doesn’t hook into what we’ve been talking about (see this post) then I don’t know what does!
[via]
Nouveau Riche University - A Wealth Building College based out of Scottsdale Arizona. Educating the Public on Real Estate Investing.
November 15th, 2006 at 7:51 pm
if can work, I don’t see any reason why this won’t.
November 15th, 2006 at 8:13 pm
Wow! “to search a region of space without actually entering that region of space.” - Aren’t they describing intuition?
November 16th, 2006 at 4:16 am
So I’ve been thinking about all this time and science and serendipity stuff you’re writing.
If you’re thinking about someone, and the phone rings, does that mean that thinking about them made the phone ring? No: but thinking about them made the phone’s ringing /significant/. In fact, it’s no more than science: you choose to make observations based on hypotheses. Where do hypotheses come from? People making observations. One of the best bits of Zen & the Art of Motorcycle Maintenance is where Phaedrus realises he has no rational explanation for where hypotheses come from. I’m inclined to agree with him - they’re definitely trans-rational. Observations and hypotheses exist in a self-stoking cycle (there’s cyclic time for you!). And self-supporting cycles are an important property of living creatures… lots of interesting connections to be made here. The Ouroboros is an interesting thing to ponder. A serpent with its tail in its mouth: what is happening?
It’s worth noting that ancient civilisations had less of a problem with reversed cause and effect: what else is an omen but an effect of something that hasn’t happened yet?
November 16th, 2006 at 5:41 am
Yes! And I sort of have another post on this tomorrow.
Whoa! Awesome - right there in the core of science!
YES! Feedback loops! Wait for my post tomorrow!
Very succintly put. Man, good stuff. Gotta go to bed though.
November 16th, 2006 at 11:07 am
No. We all (including professional physicists) need to be very careful when trying to intuit the results of quantum experiments. The amount of distance between the final machine readout and the quantum phenomenon that makes the algorithm work is HUGE, and the distance between our symbolic mind has to go to produce some narrative out of these readouts is perhaps even longer.
Read this (short, with easy math) article to understand how ‘entanglement’ and ‘observation’ are related, afterwards, you will hardly be able to read a single pop-sci article without getting angry at the absurd interpretations they come up with just because they
Quantum Mysteries Disentangled:
hxxp://www.flownet.com/ron/QM.pdf
Here is another short article explaining Bell’s Theorem.
hxxp://world.std.com/~reinhold/bellsinequalities.html
Now, to understand a little how the quantum algorithm can “run without running” (try to) read this link, the example they use to illustrate the point should raise your eyebrows! (Since they provide adequate caveats, this is in fact a reasonable illustration of the phenomenon!)
hxxp://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Quantum_Zeno_effect
QM is very interesting and teaches us a lot, but it is such an indirect science, we cannot really trust our intuitions regarding it one whit.
November 16th, 2006 at 11:18 am
Oh, the rough gist of how the non-running QM algorithm works is by tying the probability that the Grover search algorithm ran to a particular possible output. If the program does not run, you know that that particular output was the correct answer. If the program does run, you get the partial information that it must be one of the other outputs. The chained Zeno effect tries to extend this effect to the entire space of output possibilities by keeping the algorithm from decohering (i.e. becoming unpredictably entangled with the environment) and is used here as an error-reduction technique, since otherwise the error would explode when trying to extend “counterfactual computation” (misleading term) to the entire set of possible outputs.
November 16th, 2006 at 12:44 pm
Further reading:
Is Movement An Illusion? Zeno’s Paradox From a Modern Viewpoint
hxxp://www.cs.auckland.ac.nz/CDMTCS//researchreports/089walter.pdf
Counterfactual Computation may allow super-Turing hypercomputation (imo, bigger news than “the program didn’t run”):
hxxp://www.cs.auckland.ac.nz/CDMTCS//researchreports/107cds.pdf
-Mary Anne Atwood
April 18th, 2008 at 5:25 pm
[…] This is a demonstration of the Einstein-Podolsky-Rosen paradox, two particles which cannot communicate faster than the speed of light, somehow stay entangled, by some crazy sub-quantum force beyond our understanding. The best explanation that physics has offered to explain this phenomenon is that the two particles are linked by reverse causality, that they are sending messages to each other back in time to a point when they were still entangled. It’s called the Transactional Interpretation, and it seems to be the most consistent (i.e. paradox free) theory of Quantum Mechanics we have at the moment. Seriously, this is the best they’ve come up with. […]