OK, RETROCAUSALITY IS REAL; SO NOW WHAT?

Physics just became historiography, and historiography just became physics.

One of the things we've talked about a great deal on this website, and particularly in our members' vidchats, is the notion of "retrocausality," the idea that effects can flow from the future into the past, or to put it more simply, that our normal understandings of the relationship between causes and effects in time with causes being in the past, and their effects in the present and/or future, can be reversed, and that causes can indeed lie in the future, and their effects in the present or past.  The phenomenon was first noticed, in fact, by a Swedish psychologist in the 1930s who was conducting careful experiments in "parapsychology", and he noticed that what was normally attributed to some sort of telepathy on the part of his study subjects was really a case of foresight. The results were, of course, denounced as pseudo-science until the advent of quantum mechanics scientists who began to talk a similar language, a language which gave the whole notion of retrocausality a mathematical and physical foundation, according to this article shared by V.T. (for which our thanks!):

Effect Before Cause: Understanding Quantum Retrocausality

Retrocausality is, indeed, an effect that emerges from the Observer effect in quantum mechanics. Briefly stated, in the original formulations of quantum mechanics and its "Uncertainty Principle" by German physicist Werner Heisenberg, one cannot measure both the position and momentum of an electron at the same time. Thus, one decides before an experiment is conducted what one wishes to measure, and to that extent, determines the outcome of the experiment before it is performed. One might, of course, take measurements of an electron with coordinates x,y,z,t, and then at a subsequent time take measurements resulting in coordinates x1, y1, z1, and t1.  But in each case, one was looking for a certain kind of information, and that kind of information was what one observed.  But what happened when one delays the choice of what to measure? Retrocausality emerges from this:

To understand retrocausality, we must first confront the peculiar nature of quantum measurement. When physicist John Wheeler proposed his delayed-choice experiment in 1978, he was exploring a profound question about the nature of reality: Do quantum events exist as definite occurrences prior to measurement, or does the act of measurement itself somehow participate in determining what has “already happened”? Wheeler’s thought experiment suggested that a measurement made in the present could affect how a particle had behaved in the past — specifically, whether it had traveled as a wave or a particle. As Wheeler himself explained, “The past has no existence except as it is recorded in the present” (Wheeler, 1978, p. 41).

This idea that observation in the present might influence the past seemed so contrary to our understanding of causality that it was initially treated as a philosophical curiosity rather than a physical reality. Yet in 1984, Carroll Alley, Oleg Jakubowicz, and William Wickes performed the first delayed-choice experiment at the University of Maryland. Their results supported Wheeler’s hypothesis, suggesting that the choice of measurement made after a photon had allegedly “decided” whether to behave as a wave or particle seemed to retroactively determine its earlier behavior. This work was later refined by Hellmuth, Walther, Zajonc, and Schleich (1987), who wrote that their results “dramatically underscores the essential failure of naïve classical pictures for explaining quantum phenomena” (Hellmuth et al., 1987, p. 1).

The philosophical implications of these experiments cannot be overstated. If measurement choices made in the present can influence how particles behaved in the past, then our entire concept of temporal sequence requires reexamination. Physicist David Bohm...

(Bohm... there he is again!)

... whose interpretation of quantum mechanics includes what he termed “active information,” suggested that time itself might be emergent rather than fundamental. In his words, “What is meant by this is not that time doesn’t exist, but rather that the prima facie view that we have of time may be covering up some other more fundamental reality” (Bohm, 1980, p. 205).

...

Perhaps the most direct experimental investigation of retrocausality comes from the work of Antoine Suarez and colleagues, who designed an experiment specifically to test the possibility of influences traveling backward in time. Using entangled photons separated by distances large enough that relativistic effects became significant, they demonstrated correlations that could not be explained by conventional quantum mechanics without allowing for some form of communication that effectively traveled backward in time. Suarez (2008) concluded, “The before-before experiment demonstrates that quantum correlations cannot be explained by any mechanism based on relativistic influences propagating with sub-luminal or luminal speeds” (p. 397).

...

To fully appreciate the experimental evidence for retrocausality, we must consider the work of Mathew Leifer and Robert Spekkens (2013), who have shown that any ontological model of quantum mechanics that is both time-symmetric and preserves causality must necessarily include retrocausality. Their mathematical analysis indicates that the price of maintaining both time symmetry (which quantum mechanics fundamentally exhibits) and causality is the acceptance of influences that propagate backward in time. They write, “Our main theorem implies that one must either embrace retrocausality or relinquish one of the assumptions of our theorem” (Leifer & Spekkens, 2013, p. 1).

In other words, retrocausality is more or less(note the qualifier) "proven", and if "proven", the implications are profound. If the observer effects - which now must be understood to include retrocausality - can be scaled up to the macroscale and not just limited to the quantum scale, then we have perhaps a basis to explain what might be happening with the so-called Mandela Effect. Ponder the following statements carefully in terms of those possible potential macro-scale implications:

Perhaps the most profound aspect of retrocausality is what it suggests about the nature of reality itself. If causes and effects can operate bidirectionally in time, then what we perceive as the fixed past may be partially determined by events in what we consider the future.

And how would one determine if, in fact, this macro-observer effect were true? One would play with the memory of a group, and create different group memories with another group, and one would have to do so not with "changes in spellings", but with actual events, such as the deaths of famous people under a specific set of circumstances. The Mandela Effect gets its name from this requirement, for according to some people, Nelson Mandela, they remember, died in prison. In the hands of ideological purists, this physics possibility assumes dangerous proportions as they seek to erase the "untidy" events and evil memories of history in the name of some ideological "perfection".  By erasing the memory and its imprints and artefacts, they are erasing the very observers themselves. And by erasing that past, they're erasing the future as well.

See you on the flip side...

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