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 ...
In short, the big shocker in this paper: "in the quantum world time runs both backward and forward whereas in the classical world it only runs forward."
I might cite the Heisenberg Principle.
Or I might not.
I knew you were going to post that...
In a Newtonian world, hindsight is 20/20.
Where’s that darn cat?
Not to sound like a know-it-all, but the future affecting the past on a quantum level is not only decades-old theory, but there are existing machines that work on this principle.
Here’s a patent application I wrote on such a device: http://www.google.com/patents/US8068740
“The answer, so obvious in the case of the murder mystery...”
Sheesh....I’m not even sure about the answer to this!
Say my name.
Impressive!
Betelgeuse?
Maybe on the quantum level, there is no such thing as ‘time’.
Watch Master Ken defeat the “speed of light” limit.
https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=2hMoA7Q75cg
Begin at about 4:20 if you are particularly impatient.
I’m not so certain about that. Or maybe I am.
Ah.
I never really watched that show. I tried to watch from the beginning and after 2 episodes I was bored to tears and gave up.
So I don’t quite get it, sorry :(
Turned into a Mog — half man and half dog.
Now he’s his own best friend.
Obviously false.
(Effect follows cause)
“It’s not clear why in the real world, the world made up of many particles, time only goes forward and entropy always increases,” Murch said. “But many people are working on that problem and I expect it will be solved in a few years,” he said.
if you can ask that question, you’re completely in the dark.
can anything we do today cause someone else to win the 2008 and 2012 elections?
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