"You've been time tripping again, haven't you Billy?"
Posted on 02/09/2015 1:48:40 PM PST by LibWhacker
Summary: In the quantum world, the future predicts the past. Playing a guessing game with a superconducting circuit called a qubit, a physicist has discovered a way to narrow the odds of correctly guessing the state of a two-state system. By combining information about the qubit's evolution after a target time with information about its evolution up to that time, the lab was able to narrow the odds from 50-50 to 90-10.
We're so used to murder mysteries that we don't even notice how mystery authors play with time. Typically the murder occurs well before the midpoint of the book, but there is an information blackout at that point and the reader learns what happened then only on the last page.
If the last page were ripped out of the book, physicist Kater Murch, PhD, said, would the reader be better off guessing what happened by reading only up to the fatal incident or by reading the entire book?
The answer, so obvious in the case of the murder mystery, is less so in world of quantum mechanics, where indeterminacy is fundamental rather than contrived for our reading pleasure.
Even if you know everything quantum mechanics can tell you about a quantum particle, said Murch, an assistant professor of physics in Arts & Sciences at Washington University in St. Louis, you cannot predict with certainty the outcome of a simple experiment to measure its state. All quantum mechanics can offer are statistical probabilities for the possible results.
The orthodox view is that this indeterminacy is not a defect of the theory, but rather a fact of nature. The particle's state is not merely unknown, but truly undefined before it is measured. The act of measurement itself that forces the particle to collapse to a definite state.
(Excerpt) Read more at sciencedaily.com ...
This is what passes as “science” these days?
"You've been time tripping again, haven't you Billy?"
I read this yesterday.....and tomorrow.
Is that related to me never knowing what I’m going to do even one second from now until I do it? ... :-) ...
Old news ...
There are FOUR lights!
As Heisenberg said: If you can’t find your car keys, it’s probably because you know too much about their momentum.
As an analytical chemist, I enjoyed the science part of it, which was fairly good. I could be a heck of meth cook if I didn’t hate drugs and druggies.
Well, then, I guess we'd pretty much have to believe whatever you told us about it, wouldn't we?
funny if you say the future effects the past
isn’t it just as logical to say past is seeing in to the probable future adjusting accordingly..
just like we do ..
we try again see what’s going to happen and plan ahead...
The probable different “futures” effects the what happens in the now.. or if you will the “past” from the future’s perspective
This is like the physicists who thus come down to multi-verse theory and parallel worlds where all things are possible on the flimsiest proof, assume aliens or advanced humans may exist or even manipulate such, then deny a God though they agree that the Big Bang exists.
though they agree that the Big Bang exists.
Apparently not.
Bkmk
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