CAN YOU SAY “RETROCAUSATION”?
As I stated on Monday, this is one of those weeks where all the important stuff is falling off the radar as everyone is focused on the Israeli-Iranian strikes and counter-strikes, and this story is one of them, and it may contain some implications that run into the "whopper doozie" category, but that will have to wait our high octane speculation. This story was shared by T.M., who has our deep thanks for spotting it and passing it along:
Evidence of ‘Negative Time’ Found in Quantum Physics Experiment
It is always difficult to focus on the core components of such a story, because one wants to rush right to the high octane speculation components, but today I have to do a bit of both at the same time. So notice what is going on in this experiment, and what the implications are:
Their experiments involved shooting photons through a cloud of ultracold rubidium atoms and measuring the resulting degree of atomic excitation. Two surprises emerged from the experiment: Sometimes photons would pass through unscathed, yet the rubidium atoms would still become excited—and for just as long as if they had absorbed those photons. Stranger still, when photons were absorbed, they would seem to be reemitted almost instantly, well before the rubidium atoms returned to their ground state—as if the photons, on average, were leaving the atoms quicker than expected.
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That follow-up experiment, the one led by Angulo that Steinberg touted on X, can be understood by considering the two ways a photon can be transmitted. In one, the photon wears blinders of sorts and ignores the atom entirely, leaving without even a nod. In the other, it interacts with the atom, boosting it to a higher energy level, before getting reemitted.
“When you see a transmitted photon, you can’t know which of these occurred,” Steinberg says, adding that because photons are quantum particles in the quantum realm, the two outcomes can be in superposition—both things can happen at the same time. “The measuring device ends up in a superposition of measuring zero and measuring some small positive value.” But correspondingly, Steinberg notes, that also means that sometimes “the measuring device ends up in a state that looks not like ‘zero’ plus ‘something positive’ but like ‘zero’ minus ‘something positive,’ resulting in what looks like the wrong sign, a negative value, for this excitation time.”
The measurement results in Angulo and her colleagues’ experiment suggest that the photons moved through the medium faster when they excited the atoms than when the atoms remained in their ground state. (The photons aren’t communicating any information, so the outcome does not contradict the “nothing can travel faster than light” speed limit set by Einstein’s special theory of relativity.)
Now, for the purpose of the present blog, I am going to ignore that final statement in the quotation about not violating Einstein's special relativity theory, though you'll note that it is invoked here as a sort of
dogma to which all interpretations must adhere: in other words, in interpreting these results, you are not allowed to advance any interpretation of the results that violates the dogma, which seems to this amateur hack to be a very blockheaded way to be doing science. Indeed, the results of the experiment seem to suggest - allow me to state the heresy clearly and unequivocally - that only the "0" result is that in which there is no information transfer. The "n" or "-n" results appear to be alterations of the system state of the atom (and, in what is a real whopper, the observer) as a result of the photon, and hence of an information transfer that appears to follow the same vector in each case: i.e., from the photon to the atom. I cannot help but return to one of Dr. Herbert Ives' critiques of Einstein. For those of you who do not know, Dr. Ives was a scientist with AT&T Bell Laboratories in the 1930s, and one of his difficulties with Einstein was the assumption about measurements of the one-way velocity of light, or, as in this case, the one-way transference of information. Notice also that what has resulted from this experiment is that rather than a binary system of superposition, we are now dealing - if the experiments should prove to be true - with a ternary or triadic system of superposition, requiring - to my amateur's mind - much rethinking (Dirac, anyone?).But leaving all that aside, it's those negative values that intrigue me in that set of triadic results (i.e., the set {0, n, -n}, and yes, for those really paying attention, I am thinking of region one, region two, and a common surface between them. It's what you do when you're in an analogical fugue state). This is where I'm going to take my Wile E. Coyote nosedive off the edge of the cliff into the canyon of high octane speculation. In the realm of parapsychology it has been noted by some investigators that there appears to be some sort of "negative" flow of time, a kind of "retrocausation" that flows from the future to the past, with the cause being in the future, and the effect being in the past, a kind of "verily, verily I say unto you, before Abraham was, I am" sort of thing. Some have gone so far as to suggest that these "retrocausative" or "backward flows of time" sorts of thing are somehow fundamental to any consciousness, that there is a "something" which exists outside the flows of time that is thus able to detect that flow. Perhaps so, perhaps not.
But the experiment, together with those parapsychological experiments, do suggest a "whopper doozie" of an implication, and that implication can be had by repeating a question that I've asked in other contexts: can this observer effect be scaled up to more macro-cosmic scales? How might one do that? Could there be such things as "meta-events" whose causative nature in some fashion lies outside of time, yet whose effects flow in time, both causatively(value "n"), and retrocausatively (value "-n")?
If so, then we will have come full circle back to Russian astrophysicist Nikolai Kozyrev, who reminded us that time was not a scalar. What this experiment seems to be also suggesting is that it is neither a scalar, nor a vector, per se, but perhaps a field (or better, lattice structure, a quasi-crystal) of some sort.
Whether my nosedives into the canyon of high octane speculation are true or not or end, like Wile E. Coyote, as splattered nonsense on the canyon floor, are in the final analysis neither here nor there. The fact remains that this is a very intriguing development, laden with implications, and thus, this is one to watch.
See you on the flip side...
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