You know how a lot of us believe that the past can affect the present and/or future? Well, I was watching a recording of Through the Wormhole with Morgan Freeman (The episode is about Free Will) , and it was talking about physicists' perspectives and one of them believes that the future can reach back in time and affect the past (retrocausality), and not just the past affecting the present/future. So basically he believes that cause-and-effect isn't what we always thought it was, and he puts a quantum physics spin on it, which I cannot remember exactly how. Is there anyway you can justify what he means or what he could possibly mean? I don't get how the future affecting the present/past is possible. Maybe someone here can help me understand how it is.
I suspect that we have cause and effect all wrong. And my reasoning lies in the teaching of Ancient African and Asian scholars.
The Through the Wormhole episode does a little bit to shed some light on this new area of physics. . .well, it is quite old when you look at other philosophies. Anyway, it is reliant upon a different concept of time altogether. In Western Civilization, we have always believed that the past was set in stone and unchangeable. This is linked to the belief that the future is not real and unknowable. The only thing that is real is the present. It is the only thing that we can interact with and have an effect upon.
There are lot of problems with this viewpoint. One of the biggest reasons is that it is in direct conflict with something we know as fact. Time and Space are linked. If you can move any which way in Space, why could you not do that in Time? Taking Einstein along a big further, why do strange things happen to time near the speed of light? Why does my view on the passage of time, differ when I am in motion, as opposed to when I am at rest? There are so many unanswered questions, but you have to remember, we have used incomplete theories to make predictions and to make sense of our world. I am not making a critique, I am simply stating a fact. We do what we can to figure out one event from another and one object from the next. Nothing is wrong with that.
So, understanding that we do not have a complete picture of time, space, gravity, the speed of light, energy, and matter, let us figure start to explore some other alternatives. You might call this science fiction, but the theoretical physics community, the one that is responsible for our current incomplete understanding, are mostly agreed that we are farther away from understanding existence than we have ever been.
We know that particles in the Quantum realm do not have any respect for time. Electromagnetic radiation does not even experience time. In fact, if you were able to travel at the speed of light, you could be everywhere in all of existence at one time. And this is a result from using the faulty understanding that we currently have.
As for the future effecting the past, think about classical physics. Since light, time and space are related. If I exceed the speed of light through local space using Einstein's equations, I will move backwards in time. Now there are all kinds of models in classical physics where this seems to happen. If we live in a spinning universe, that absolutely happens. It happens when two blackholes converge. It happens with entanglement in the Quantum realm.
So the future affecting the past is already possible using the flimsy models we have now to make sense of our existence. We know that there is physics and an understanding beyond the Standard Model. And in physics, if something is mathematically possible, it is pretty much a probability. Time is probably not a straight line. It is probably more like a sheet, that you can move forwards, backwards, and sideways on. We are probably only able to sense or to capture a sliver, therefore we think it is a straight line. The future, past, and present are more than likely all connected and influence each other all the time and we simply cannot perceive what is going on. That's what I am trying to tell Khasm in the other thread.
