I was chatting with someone in the bookstore about the paradoxical nature of quantum physics, the both of us largely agreeing with each other in marveling at this, and then I said something that went a little too far; too far for his estimation of what quantum physics actually says about the nature of reality. I said that a variation of that double slit experiment has shown that how we look at these sub-atomic particles can even determine or change what has has happened in the past; back up the timeline in that particles trajectory as it were. He thought I was just being funny and kind of facetious, but this is actually true.
Interesting, you hit this customer’s ‘woo barrier.’ Yep, effects backwards in time. Confirmed in the laboratory for small stretches of time after a famous thought experiment extending it to the entire universe (as created retrospectively out of observation). Sounds utterly insane but physicists haven’t been able to exorcise it from the lab. I get into this in a future post. (And as you probably know, ‘entanglement’ between photons has been discovered to occur not only across vast stretches of space, but also vast stretches of time.)
I was chatting with someone in the bookstore about the paradoxical nature of quantum physics, the both of us largely agreeing with each other in marveling at this, and then I said something that went a little too far; too far for his estimation of what quantum physics actually says about the nature of reality. I said that a variation of that double slit experiment has shown that how we look at these sub-atomic particles can even determine or change what has has happened in the past; back up the timeline in that particles trajectory as it were. He thought I was just being funny and kind of facetious, but this is actually true.
Interesting, you hit this customer’s ‘woo barrier.’ Yep, effects backwards in time. Confirmed in the laboratory for small stretches of time after a famous thought experiment extending it to the entire universe (as created retrospectively out of observation). Sounds utterly insane but physicists haven’t been able to exorcise it from the lab. I get into this in a future post. (And as you probably know, ‘entanglement’ between photons has been discovered to occur not only across vast stretches of space, but also vast stretches of time.)
I really enjoyed this piece, Geoff! Fascinating.
Thank you, Nuria!