Why Physicists Think The Future Changes the Past - Retrocausality Explained

Retrocausality, a mind-blowing quantum concept, proposes that future events impact the past. Challenging time's traditional flow and exploring interconnected temporal relationships. Can the universe communicate with its past-self?
0:00 What is Retrocausality?
00:55 The Layers of the Universe
02:17 The Universe Is Not Real
04:32 The Role of Quantum Entanglement
08:02 Does Time Travel Explain the Mysteries of the Universe?
#retrocausality #timetravel #quantummechanics
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[@MentalAmanda]

I clicked on this video because I am fascinated by theories about reality and because I had a very odd experience surrounding the death of my mom in 2007. She had a heart attack and was taken to the hospital for immediate surgery. I stayed at the hospital through the seven hour surgery and visited her in recovery after until she suggested that I get some rest. Her surgery went well, she was recovering and everything seemed normal, even by the analysis of the doctors. As I started to walk out of the room, I was gripped by an irrational feeling that I would never see her again. She assured me that I would and I convinced myself to go back to our apartment. I decided to lay in her bed for comfort. I fell asleep but was awakened in a cold sweat by a crippling panic. I knew something was wrong with her. I frantically began searching for the card with the information to call her. My phone rang within a minute or two. It was one of the doctors telling me to get to the hospital immediately. She was having an episode and they were trying to resuscitate her. They failed and she passed. I don't remember ever having a panic attack before that day and I had no reason to believe that anything was wrong. It was like I knew she was going to die before she did.

[@chris-terrell-liveactive]

I've had a number of premonition experiences over the years, all of which were accurate and never available "on demand". I think this points to the underestimated potential of our minds and a basically limited view of the nature of "reality". I can't help the feeling that much in these hypotheses is missing a vital point, though I can't articulate what that is at the moment. My condolences and best wishes to you.

[@free_spirit1]

Thank you for sharing.

[@strikeback1080]

Sorry for your loss.

[@1earthangel2023]

You are probably an Empath. We know and see EVERYTHING.

[@brucelee5576]

It’s because you, your mother , and everything is connected , nothing in the universe is unconnected it only feels that way , there really is no space or time or anything else there’s only zero point energy. We all come from what I can only describe as God , not the God of human religion but the source itself. The God is experiencing what they call the Subject/ Object split . It’s trying to figure out what it is , where does it come from.

[@minacapella8319]

My favorite thing about the universe that I've learned thus far is that so much is determined by our very own observation. It's almost like reality itself was made for consciousness to exist.

[@benwilliams3539]

That's proof of God my friend

[@mollusk7758]

​@@benwilliams3539There probably is a higher consciousness, but we wouldn't know anything about it unless it shows itself

[@itemushmush]

no its a common misconception that "observe" needs a conscious being to observe it. thats not the case. "observation" in QM is any particle interacting with any other particle. No consciousness needed

[@itemushmush]

it would be better to use the word "interaction" as it gets rid of any intent of humans or whatever

[@pH7oslo]

@@benwilliams3539 On the contrary - if god was real, and omniscient as the bible claims, everything would already have been observed, and thus we wouldn't have unresolved quantum states.

[@tufif]

I was recently in a situation I like to call Shrodinger's Freezer. The power went out and my wife was worried about the food in the freezer going bad and wanted to check on it. I brought up that before opening the freezer we don't know if it's good or bad, but if we open the freezer before the power came back on then it would go bad before we had a chance to cook it, so the only reason to open the freezer would be not to check if it was good or not but only to throw all of the food away. Luckily, she left it closed until the power came back and most of the food was still good.

[@emery5581]

Not so. When you open the freezer for a few seconds to measure internal temperatures (best to use remote sensors), the low specific heat outside air that enters will have only a very slight influence on temperatures even if the freezer is only half full. So rest assured, checking the temperature is the best option. In fact, the temperature thus obtained can be used to quite accurately predict how long before the food must be taken out to be cooked. The temperature curve can be estimated through the solution of some simple diff. equations, which is an exponential decay to ambient temperature.

[@Unmannedair]

I like that😂

[@alkh3myst]

So, did you collapse the steak function?

[@samisparkleheart]

I learned recently to put a cup of water in the fridge and let it freeze when you know bad weather is imminent. Put a coin on the frozen water's surface, when the freezer is off and the water unfreezes the coin will drop and the food will have gone bad. If it goes off and comes back on but the coin still dropped below the surface - the food may have gone bad because the freezer went off for a long time before it came back on. Frozen water and coin on top = all is well 👌

[@mondopinion3777]

@@samisparkleheart Brilliant !! Fyi, I keep a few dozen new canning jars as a kind of insurance policy for the chicken and lamb meat I raise. If power goes out for too long, I will can it all with my pressure canner, using a propane burner in the back yard.

[@reinux]

It's interesting how to me, coming from a comp sci background, none of the three ideas are as discomforting as they probably ought to be. To us, it's just delayed evaluation, and ideally, the trigger for the evaluation is handled by the runtime in an optimal way and is totally invisible to you. More than anything it's probably an indication of how detached from reality computers can make us feel.

[@blackhole77]

I like this comment! It's interesting. From a religious-spiritual background, I agree - the ideas and their specific implications don't take away from the beauty of creation and existence even in the slightest, and I am always excited for science to progress and realize new ideas about this awe-inspiring mysterious experience we call life :) cheers

[@albert.33]

Beautiful awareness

[@scienceByV]

Or we are actually in a program and just cant see or understand the execution and only the results like a variable in a software

[@danielhavens7561]

I believe a better explaination is that both particles are the same higher dimensional particle being expressed in two spacial localities at the same time where each representation is a mirror of the other in space. When one changes it's quantum state, the whole higher dimension particle changes it's quantum state therefore representing the change in both spatial localities at the same time.

[@richardcraven]

I like this

[@techbricks5300]

Yes, I like to say "they're in the same spacial shell". I have my own space idea on this.

[@patrickday4206]

I think particles are existing in two places at the same time

[@brotherofthesouth]

This was perhaps the first time I actually understood any of this. Very well explained

[@Thedrummaman76]

I bet there are a lot of explainers who don't really understand it either lol im always left with questions. But this time was different!

[@DNTMEE]

Be careful. Nobel laureate Richard Feynman is supposed to have said: _“If you think you understand quantum mechanics, you don't understand quantum mechanics.”_

[@DNTMEE]

@Maplewalnuht So you're saying Richard Feynman is naive? Perhaps you could enlighten Richard and the rest of us?

[@lewiscoacher7781]

@@DNTMEE The assumption that it requires identity with Richard Feynman to understand QM is indeed naive, and that is exactly what the quote says. Whether Feynman ever actually said it is the question. He showed that he could be injudicious while proclaiming, and I never called him on it. I never met him either, but still. My bad.

[@zacharysway575]

That explanation of how info and cause can only travel at the max speed of light helped me truly quantify the concepts of time being relative to space

[@rawleystanhope3251]

So delighted to have discovered this channel! Thank you Dr. Ben!

[@mladenstific2459]

I really dig your style, Dr :) Kudos for not picking a team and just condensing the current state of the art thinking on this topic.

[@amoghsinha4305]

I have always found retrocausality an interesting concept. Imagine this, you have a certain memory of you receiving a gift from someone special and you cherished that gift. Later you find out that the gift wasn't meant for you, this not only changes your current perspective of the gift, but also the past memory which you dearly cherished. You can say that it was always the case that the gift didn't belong to you, but thats where relativity comes in. From your perspective, your past changed after receiving additional information.

[@michaelfried3123]

this video was mostly just philosophical nonsense.

[@GiganFTW]

Your past changed? Or how you interpret that event has changed.

[@skateboardingjesus4006]

The cause doesn't necessarily follow from the effect, retroactively? Discreet retroactive changes that might not be noticeable on a macroscopic level? Temporal tunnelling if you will?

[@williamsteveling8321]

@@skateboardingjesus4006 if the concept holds any water, it's likely to be highly limited and bordering on truly random. The real catch is can it result in information being transmitted retroactively? I can think of a few implications and limited applications, but it's always going to be exceptional, random, and usually useless unless the probabilities could be manipulated.

[@jimreaper1337]

But you didn't change your past, just your perception of a single object within that past which is still unchanged You still received the gift, you still cherrished that gift for years, it's only when you found out it wasn't meant for you, your perception of that gift changed, but everything about that gifts past and yours stays exactly the same!!

[@brianegendorf2023]

The way I see the "Entanglement" issue, is that the particles are actually more than entangled. They are unified. When you provide a bias to one side of the particles, it instantly shifts the bias of the other. Not because one is deciding based off of what the other is doing..but because they are actually one solid item. Picture the a see saw. No matter how far apart either side of the see saw is, the instant once side is at its apex, the other side will be at its nadir. The distance between the two objects doesn't really matter. The fact that they are actually one object, means that what is happening is fully a deterministic local process. It might seem like a ridiculous statement, but regardless of whether that see saw is 1 inch long, a mile long, or parsecs long there is 0 distance between either end of the see saw. Because each end of the see saw is part of the see saw. Its all one locality.

[@kevinpruett6424]

And probably as knotted as a snake can manage, with eggsacks on each scale!

[@dredgerivers7730]

I see saw what you did, there...

[@nick1234567891231]

Distance and time are human inventions

[@dredgerivers7730]

The three true dimensions are actually space, time, and patience. Geometry is the shadow of a higher dimensional structure (a language) which doesn't fit in physicality. It's like the 2-D world seeing an apple as only a slice, or a series of slices which change shape over time. Geometry is a slice of something much more wonderful, but it's all that can fit within our reality. Crop circles could be a god farting, or coughing, or dropping a gum wrapper.

[@dredgerivers7730]

Or not. I forgot to mention that I could be wrong. But I'm not.

[@aksbeixhev]

You're a good teacher, I never heard anyone explain entanglement so short and precisely. To keep the interest of non physicists it must be explainedso we can follow, you managed to keep it easily digestible.

[@guitarszen]

As a physicist myself, he didn't say anything that cannot be gleaned from an introductory reading of these topics. You can find the same explanation in many places, in many videos.

[@he8535]

The explanation in the about (↑↓) and (←→) spin isn't what I've heard because I've heard 0,1,both this explanation is more like 0,1,2,3

[@1SpudderR]

We are all physicists....But not all are aware of it!?

[@nightmareTomek]

@@1SpudderR You mean wannabe physicists.

[@gcardenasa19]

I'm new too the retrocausality concept but I will say it's definitely what happens when are sleeping and hear a sudden noise that potentially wakes you up. The noise, although unexpected, fits perfectly in your dream....

[@durere]

Yesss. I had a cat once, every night at 4am he would get the zoomies around the apartment, and one of his favorite spots was the couch I was sleeping on. One night I was dreaming of arguing with some dudes, and it looked like it was about to go down. Right then and there the cat jumped on the couch and swatted me in the mouth, with the tip of one of his claws out, for extra sting. I took that as getting punched in my dream, and rose up from the bed like a jack-in-the-box, guard up, yelling ''come get some you mthrfkrs!!'' Needless to say, my roommate who was up playing video games next to me had a bit of a startle.

[@robertmatthews4244]

@@durere 😹😹😹 That’s funny! I’ve learned that if I can’t find a bathroom (in my dreams) & keep looking, to only find none; it means that I am in a dream & need to wake- ‘cause I really gotta pee!😜😹😎 -& I’m not making this up!

[@durere]

@@robertmatthews4244 good one! Don't get me started on bathrooms in dreams, I fell into that trap once :V

[@robertmatthews4244]

@@durere 🙈🙉🙊😹

[@NightRunner417]

I've had this happen SO many times and I have wondered at it occasionally but I somehow manage to dismiss this impossibility as trivial, which now that I think about it seems pretty irresponsible. To that end, I see two possibilities: 1) The dreamworld/mind or both somehow receive or predict what is coming through sensory input before it actually happens in the waking world, and thus is able to build the storyline around it in comfortably perfect timing to make it all come together. This insinuates that especially during sleep, some component of mind is at least a little bit outside of real world time. That's certainly what it feels like, and boy is it ever bizarre if you give it any thought. When you get down to it, it's right up there with all the weird stuff like psychic phenomena and out of body experiences. 2) The perception isn't what we think it is. The sensory input is actually preceding the events of the dream by some seconds, then the brain puts the sensory input together with the newly created plot twist and THEN you experience it. This just doesn't feel right, feels wrong for a number of reasons. Chief amongst them would be that this would be REALLY bad for survival. We're creations of a often deadly world, and as such we need to react to stimuli RIGHT NOW, especially when we're asleep. A threatening sound needs to be acted on immediately, knocking you out of sleep so you can defend yourself against the associated threatening creature. Delaying the response is going to end up costing a lot of lives, and there's no benefit to it other than nifty sleep-entertainment, which serves no valuable purpose. Note that weaving precognitive perception into a dream isn't particularly good for survival either, but at least you still get startled awake even if your dream was trying to make it something more interesting than the waking world had in store for you. Maybe it just doesn't know what else to do with it, and there are plenty of similar experiences I could cite that seem to indicate that the dreaming mind is frequently confused about its agendas and information.

[@EthanGrech]

You've got a really impressive style in the way you describe things. Thanksa a lot!

[@navstar7334]

Top notch presentation! But I'm going to have to watch again... and perhaps again 🤔. Cheers Ben, very much enjoyed it. I think a seed has been shown & I'm not going to be able to resist getting back into this realm of physics!

[@danielsartori1701]

I really like the way that this video condenses the complex ideas of quantum mechanics into an ideal form that feels mentally digestible. It's just enough to make you think without overwhelming the viewer with too much of the reality behind it, so to speak. Keeping with the high level explanation, I'm curious how retrocausality affects the function of a quantum computer. If retrocausality is the explanation, and the block universe is what we are experiencing, then by attempting to communicate information across a vast distance by changing the state of one particle to excite the change in another can't really happen, right? By changing the state of an observed particle, you would then be altering the original local correlation between the two particles so that the information was always what you wanted to convey from the very beginning. I suppose for a human moving through time relative to the observed instant, the state of the information changed as they expected it to, in the present. Big picture, if the past could be changed, we would never know it, because we would experience the causal result as if it were always the truth regardless. So retrocausality doesn't really change the way we are doing things, because they will behave the same they always have from our point of view. They always were, even when that past state is altered.

[@A_Stereotypical_Guy]

Changing the state of an entangled particle doesn't change anything about the other

[@drbuckley1]

"Choice" is not permitted in a deterministic Universe. There is no such thing as "free will," in this perspective.

[@BeardedBarley1]

Yet some of us remember a history, which we can share with each other sometimes in minute detail, that many others don’t. In light of the science understood in memory being stored in the heart because of studies done on a mass amount of heart transplant recipients, those who share these memories of former timelines seem to be retrieving them from heart memories. Somehow, the memories of the heart supersede the memories of the brain in these people. It’s no wonder since the electromagnetic field of the heart is substantially greater than the brain. And that some people are more in tune with that part of their being than others is no wonder at all, especially since some are born gifted in some areas and not in others. For example, some are born consummate musicians. Others are born mathematical geniuses. Even still others are born with physical beauty...and etc. So it doesn’t take a stretch of the imagination to wrap one’s brain around this subject matter that some are born with the ability to remember with their hearts more readily than others. The science is there. It’s not oogah boogah or pseudoscience. You just have to look at the science of it and accept it. Thus, your understanding of this phenomenon of retrocausality would only be for those who do not have a kind of heart memory gifting.

[@A_Stereotypical_Guy]

@@BeardedBarley1 what does the em field have to do with memory storage? You're talking garbage and you know it. Go back to the spirit science channel

[@KootFloris]

Well I think that what scientists measure and how they explain it in words we all understand may have big gaps. Quantum mechanics, the observer influences the outcome, even became the pseudo spiritual 'The Secret': you create your own reality. I bet we see the exaggeration there. Same is happening here. We make up stories we understand. Still many other things could be happening, more profound, more simple or more mysterious. In stories like this video, I always end up feeling the scientists got their logic wrong, not the measurement.

[@dylansmith5627]

I came across a solution to this problem on a physics youtube channel a while back (forgive me, I forgot where it was or to whom it had been accredited). The solution was thus: Every time a quantum wave function collapses, the universe is narrowed down. Basically, if a wave function represents all potential possibilities of a quantum decision, then an observation chooses one of those possibilities and puts the observer "in phase" with this possibility. The natural consequence of this is that the observer's portion of the universe that it is "in phase" with will decrease over time, which also explains entropy increasing over time (loss of apparent information). This hypothesis is appealing because it does not require retro-causality nor instantaneous particle action; the apparent instantaneous action is simply a result of narrowing the probability field embedded in the universe the observer is in phase with.

[@scottbaker8528]

But why (or how) does their observation of the first particle affect the other particle?

[@KenOtwell]

@@scottbaker8528 If I'm understanding Smith correctly - the properties of the two particles are joined in each distinct possible universe, so that when the wave function collapses in your local space, that selects a specific set of universes where that choice of the property is true and that is necessarily the same universe where the other particle has the opposite property. The only thing traveling faster than light, so to speak, is the elimination of a set of possible universes where the wave would have collapsed differently. Not sure I agree, but that's the way I read his explanation.

[@scottbaker8528]

@@KenOtwell big Like. Makes sense. And that the particle was [spinning up] well before the observer arrived in that particular location of the wave, and the decision of the observer of where (and when?) to observe the collapsed point is how the particle’s spin is determined… Better said, the cat is dead because when I decided to open the box. Wait, now we’re back to time. This reminds me of the video switching the double slit experiment from space to time. Let me go rewatch that…

[@jonbrand5068]

So what you're saying is that... In a realm where quantum echoes sway, A function’s end marks each new day. The universe narrows with each choice, In phase with the observer's voice. In the dance of space-time, entropy grows, As information ebbs and flows. No need time's arrow to reverse, All this cosmic quantum verse.

[@camrynprieto6987]

@@jonbrand5068 love this rhyme!

[@jessesk8zzz372]

You're an absolute legend for making this video; thank you 🙏

[@chrissscottt]

Interesting thanks. Adds another layer to the things I know I don't understand.

[@ovoj]

Communicating with your younger self. Hmm. Internal few weeks ago I watched something where someone did a psychedelic and saw a younger version of them selves experiencing a traumatic event. He then consoled and gave solace to himself and now that wound has been healed in him. He changed his past. He had a traumatic event. Meaning he had negative thoughts, feelings and emotions tied into it. He changed the energy of that memory and that situation to a positive one. Meaning his updated memory is now a positive one and not a negative one. His future self met his past self

[@steve.k4735]

He didn`t `change his past` he changed in the present the `memory` of that past event, memory is stored in the brain and the brain has plasticity.

[@ovoj]

@@steve.k4735 he changed the energy of the past event. The effect it had on him

[@steve.k4735]

@@ovoj yes I understand what you are saying BUT he changed his PRESENT memory of a past event.. Not the real past but the present memory.. And it's not 'energy' it's connections between neurons, memories are of the past not In the past

[@thedevilsadvocate5210]

what about mandella effect?

[@steve.k4735]

@@thedevilsadvocate5210 What about it? what are you asking? .. oh and google `Challenger memory study` on the fallibility of human memory

[@susanrobertson984]

I listened to something on this topic the other day so thanks YT for the recommend. I took away that 1) we experience time at the speed of light and 2) if the particles don’t experience time then there is technically no future and past states which is mind bending for us moving through time.

[@wingnut4200]

Lovely vid. I have a much better grasp on the questions presented around the time slit experiments than ever before. Well, to the extent I have a grasp on anything.

[@viralsheddingzombie5324]

I don't believe that wibbly wobbly, timey wimey stuff.

[@bbbb98765]

But that's just because, next to The Doctor, we are intellectual ants

[@matthewyabsley]

Don't worry. Future you will sort you out.

[@iampiyushsingh7544]

Not everyone one has to believe just handful of highly intelligent and passionate people are enough to prove and to build things based on it.

[@ralphclark]

@@iampiyushsingh7544 dude. Doctor Who is SCIENCE FICTION. It’s not even written by people with degrees in the physical sciences. It’s written by people who went to art college.

[@iampiyushsingh7544]

@@ralphclark what ? When I talked about dr who, maybe you replied to the wrong person

[@openyoureyesandseethefutur5802]

your complicated subjects are easy to listen to, thx, i hit the like button and subscribed

[@stevewolfbrandt4932]

I once heard of an experiment where two groups of students took the same test without any studying. Then a few days later one group studied for the same test. After looking at the results, it was found that the group that studied for the test in the “future “ scored significantly better than the group that did not. Dr. , have you heard of this experiment ? Seems pretty easy to recreate it. Thank you.

[@MrReallogs]

doesnt really mean anything other than the people that took the test may have had rudimentary knowledge of what was being tested

[@drsjamesserra]

Wait whut?

[@ralphlitton8521]

You wrote, "Then a few days later one group studied for the same test. The group that studied for the test in the “future “ scored significantly better than the group that did not" FYI, You're not explaining yourself fully. It's not clear. You might want to go back re-read/edit your comment. Do you have link to the study? We would need to read the whole study.

[@petercini2022]

Explanation is quite clear

[@usaturnuranus]

I've decided, after studying this problem a week from today, that my optimal course of action is to edit myself out of this version of existential reality. Theref re I wil nth lo g r be a le t r sp nd n a y m an gf l ay. anks f r all th f sh!

[@john-wiggains]

It’s interesting to see very similar debates happening with physicists communities that have happened with many theologians. Questions of determinism specifically in this case.

[@protorhinocerator142]

From a biblical perspective, God starts with the future and back-fills the past. This is similar to a project manager starting with a due-by date and creating the schedule backwards to meet that goal. If we need a product on Friday that means we need to prototype by Thursday. That sort of thing. And if you watch any Gordon Ramsay cooking show, he wants all the food for a table to come out at one time. That means dropping items into the pot at certain times in reverse. Timing is everything. Since the Bible has many End-Times prophecies, this has absolutely changed the way we see future events. People expect an apocalypse at some point and prepare for it to varying degrees. Scoffers even prepare by preparing arguments for why it will never happen. Very few people if any are completely unaffected by biblical prophecies. Even if they say they are, the world around them has changed, which will have some effect on them.

[@earthwalker7992]

Yes, philosophy, theology, and science do touch upon each other quite frequently!

[@talastra]

It's also not an accident that those in favor of predeterminism are some of the most morally repugnant.

[@lobstrosity7163]

If our actions are predestined we shouldn't award or punish anyone.

[@boianko]

@@lobstrosity7163 Predestination only matters to us if we can see the future. From our perspective it might as well not exist on the macro scale.

[@lkjhgfdsayxcvbnm]

What if both photons are actually one and the same 4D object? This is actually similar to retro causality, since its again just a single photon visible at two different locations by going through a 4th dimension. You just can't know, if it's actually time or if there is another 4th dimension

[@klowen7778]

Interesting idea, that the apparently 'instantaneous' communication between the pairs of photons, and transcending the speed of light, might really be occurring through some 'hidden' dimension!

[@theseustoo]

It would need to be a 5D object... because the 4th dimension IS time. Time is the dimension which makes movement or, perhaps more accurately, the perception of movement (IF all times 'exist' simultaneously) possible.

[@M-Try]

@@theseustoo there is no order to the spacetime dimensions. its more like a group of dimensions, and one of them is time, but there is no way to order them, ie. there is no 2nd or 5th dimension, in the same way that the students in a classroom have no "true" order. One philosophy of objects though, is that all objects in our universe are N-dimensional, and N is the number of dimensions that exist. You could thus talk about entangled photons possibly being "large in a higher dimension" :)

[@theseustoo]

@@M-Try Hmmm... Well... in the sense that all dimensions exist simultaneously, it could be said that 'there is no order' to them... perhaps! But the 2nd dimension could not possibly exist without the existence of the 1st dimension, which therefore must have a 'prior' ('a-priori') existence... and the 3rd dimension couldn't exist without a similar 'a-priori' existence of the 2nd and 1st dimensions, etc... So, to the extent that the 'arrow of time', apparently at least, moves only in one direction (from what we call the 'past' to what we call the 'future') they do actually have some kind of order... time being not only the 4th dimension, but evidently, also the ordering principle. I think part of the problem is that people are rather fuzzy and unclear in what they really mean when talking about 'dimensions'... especially when they are referring to, say creatures from a 'different dimension', or 'alternative universes'. Often the word 'dimension' is used to refer to what would actually be more like 'groups' or 'sets' of dimensions, as, for example in the 'multiverse' hypothesis, which, if such a multiverse exists, would have to consist, not just of an infinite number of separate 'dimensions', but rather of an infinite number of groups, or SETS of dimensions, since any given universe would require at least FOUR dimensions to have any real existence (especially in terms of mass). (I think you seem to understand this already, more or less...) I've also recently been considering the possibility that, rather than ultra-tiny 'dimensions' as some scientists seem to think of as different 'dimensions', but which I can't help but think of as simply ultra-small, but still existing within the normal 3 (or four) usual dimensions, things like colour, sound, smell, feel (i.e. 'touch'), language and even thought itself, are 'dimensions'... at least in the sense that I'm using the word. Which is to say that not all dimensions are merely spatial and/or temporal, though they do, of course, all exist within the spatio-temporal dimensions. Which, of course, would mean that the other universes in the multiverse would probably all need at least some of these 'dimensions' too and so each universe would have sets of even more than four dimensions, though it's also conceivable that they may have more or less dimensions that our own universe. This is why I say that they would need AT LEAST four... (and maybe many more!) Four dimensions being a sort of 'minimum requirement' for any actual universe to exist as an ontological reality. But I'm not a physicist and recognize that my own thoughts on this topic are merely speculations... so I'm not dogmatic about them! I recognise that this is just how I see things. 😉

[@M-Try]

@@theseustoo what I rather meant by my original comment is that there is no true way of ordering them. let's go back to the classroom analogy: student number 4 cannot exist without student number 3, that is to say that they are being counted one after another. there is a first dimension, and there is a second dimension and a third and quite possibly a few more spatial dimensions. however the issue arises when we assign, let's say time, as a dimension, to one of these numbers. to say that something extending significantly into a Large Extra Dimension is in the 5th dimension, not the 4th, as that would be the time axis, is to assign an Order to these dimensions. You can merely count dimensions, there is no hierarchy to them that would give rise to any particular sorted enumeration. There is no particular 4th dimension. The set of dimensions is an unordered set of axes (plural of axis, not axe). Time is just one of them.

[@johnnicholas1488]

As Ernest Hernandez wrote 130 years ago, " the future throws its shadow into the past." To observe this truisim just play the film backwards. The flow of water and electricity create backwards eddies, against the current backwards toward the source. Thought has similar eddies. If you drop a tomato from a height, it does the same. What does this all mean ? Beats the hell out of mean. Why the hell should anything have a "meaning" ?

[@hyr1972]

When science is so advanced, it is magic

[@laochen8869]

1.For every object in our universe time is function of its speed in space and also function of the gravity force around it. 2.Our universe is with proven nonlocality. Considering these facts science is close to magic.

[@michaelfried3123]

When science is so advanced its philosophical nonsense more like it...

[@archimedesd5794]

Magic has always been science not yet understood. Once upon a time alchemy was considered magic practice, now we just call them pharmacists.

[@Erickhetfield]

Is not advanced, is clearly incomplete and probably wrong.

[@slywitt_the_cold1108]

Science is the study of this magic. Just because we know what a magnet is, for example, doesn’t make it any less magical.

[@markofsaltburn]

I watched this tomorrow and will love it.

[@patriciaa.5571]

Excellent and easier to understand than other explanations. Thanks.

[@AndyPanda9]

We're in a simulation and it's a more efficient use of resources to leave everything as a probability until it matters (maybe that's why we call it matter?) Everything that doesn't matter to the state of the sim is left as a probability until it interacts (get's detected/measured, affects something else). Only then are the properties set. Feynman's spinning arrows and what direction the arrow is pointing at the moment of interaction when the properties are determined and snap into being - I mean Feynman's arrows are a way of counting that we can use to calculate/predict what the properties will be (what are the odds?) even if our minds can't quite make sense of it.

[@mrxcs]

It's the universe 's Nanite

[@jeffrybassett7374]

I would point out that Maxwell's equations produce both positive and negative solutions. Consensus was that the negative solutions, which implied that EM waves propagated backwards in time as well as forward, were non-sensical and should be ignored. Maybe there's a connection?

[@erawanpencil]

This is really interesting, can you suggest a link? I always had a gut feeling that entropy insisting 'things always become less ordered' felt a bit artificial or perspective-generated/biased after the fact. In order to assert the 2nd law's validity, you need to a priori have information about 'the past' and insert a definition of disorder/work etc. It reminds me of the Sleeping Beauty problem where both seemingly contradictory 'perspectives' are apparently correct- subjective probability vs objective. Maybe subjectivity and objectivity can be united so to speak if these negative and positive results are both let into the picture?

[@vanceg18]

Good video! But I also think a discussion of the many worlds approach to this issue (when we measure the photon, we "choose" a world where the other photon is in the corresponding state) would have rounded out a full exploration of the issue.

[@thebreadtable4880]

That was my intuitive idea, feel so seen and heard.

[@KrystianGage]

I read an article that talked about how someone had discovered particles reaching us from something that looked like a mirror of our universe. I’d imagine if you flipped into a mirror, time would be moving backwards from the moment you entered it. Another interesting thought, when you were talking about how basically we live in a quantum web of interactions it reminded me of the old stoic belief that everything in the universe is connected by a web, and that all actions had an unseen consequence somewhere. Loved the video!

[@v00n2000]

The infinite cycle of birth, death, rebirth

[@v00n2000]

In each moment we are reborn.

[@violetsimmonsbrain]

Many people who have near death experiences talk about their experience of seeing a web made of millions of tiny lights; and the lights being each of our choices. Fascinating!

[@JamJellyFishJam]

Time isn't moving we just consciously sortof hop through it somehow the present is constantly changing and eternal the future and past exist but we never touch it, but we never notice due to ever changing present and past and future because they change with it all

[@JamJellyFishJam]

@@violetsimmonsbrain i never saw that ive had a few NDE's and i kind of just, well, saw everything i guess. then forgot most of it.

[@paulcooper1046]

Thanks for covering this topic at a deliberate pace so someone such as myself can grasp the key concepts. Cheers, mate!...☀

[@anajol8269]

I experience mind blowing synchronistic events on a fairly regular basis. This has led me to investigate Time and "What is consciousness" .. and most importantly: "Who are we" Some synchronistic events have enabled me to vaguely predict future events in a way that is difficult to write of as coincidence due to the recurring nature of these events . Is synchronicity a clue to understanding time and the universe. Is matter an extension of our consciousness? I think it could be. Are we only just barely aware of our potential, are we just in the chrysalis stages of our evolution? Who are we?

[@generator6946]

When I was young I could do this too. I was accurate.

[@henrybutler1123]

This man explains things extremely well and with deep understanding for how difficult these concepts are for us viewers who in the main are far less scientifically gifted. Will be watching more... 🎉

[@nightmareTomek]

Explains it wrong, too.

[@man_of_lawlessness]

My grandfather watched this video with me and said"is retro causality forcing him to age because the future him is dead"😆 I spat out the pringles I was eating everywhere he genuinely thought it was right 😮❤

[@I80TudW]

My gut so much agrees with this theory. Always have routed for Bohm mechanic and the associated hidden variables. Its just to destabilizing for our separate sense of self and felt sense of autonomy to get the larger physicsts community (which are all just mere humans afraid of dying and not existing like the rest of us). So the hidden variables would just be hidden because they come from the future. Also just lines up so much more with what buddhists and other spiritual practioners and psychonauts have learned about our conciousness over last millenia. Thank you for this very informative and down-to-earth presentation!

[@kevinpruett6424]

This is anything APART from down to earth. We choose not to limit ourselves to one minEraBall. This is dynamic wiring cables & flowcharts... What contorts likely has to ingest its own tail to remain steady in tune

[@Aim54Delta]

My field of experience is electronics - RF, microwave stuff. I think there is a lot of stuff we are missing within our explanations of "the mundane" that could shed some light on these questions. For example, it is my understanding that we don't really have a good model of how, exactly, antennas work. We have a lot of models to describe how an antenna will perform, but the same force that generates a photon of light from an LED or industrial cutting laser also generates a microwave that can cook your food or steer a missile. This seems simple enough, and there doesn't seem to be a need to consider whether or not microwave photons are actually inside your microwave.... Until we think about how AC circuits behave and what defines RF. An antenna's properties are defined by its geometry, usually, and that definition derives from the formulae for inductance and capacitance. Usually, in electronics, we just say that current does not flow in an open circuit, but this is not entirely true, as a capacitor demonstrates - current will flow in response to propagating the electric field through the conductor, and that current flow creates a magnetic field that will continue to move across the conductor. RF is simply driving into an extremely small resonant tank circuit, and some fun tricks can be pulled off by substituting inductance/capacitance for length in situations where conductor length is a significant factor to create effective RF reflectors. This is basically the operating principle behind a reflex-klystron. The question I usually have is "where is the photon?" Let's contrast the function of an antenna with a close counterpart... a transformer. A transformer has a primary and secondary winding and utilizes the principle of induction to transfer energy between the two. An antenna radiates energy, presumably in the form of photons, into free space. Most practical transformers have a ferrite core and that introduces a whole additional complexity that is not really necessary. Air core transformers exist and are becoming more common with improvements in switching performance of transistors. The question revolves around why an antenna radiates free photons, but a simple pair of wires couples the movement of electrons. I forget which university demonstrated it, but they created a series of resonant circuits and placed them at regular intervals for something like 99% transmission efficiency over tens of meters, wirelessly. Regardless of how we slice and dice the figures, there is a simple question of how the coils know where each other are. Ostensibly, this is not "radiated" EMF, but "coupled" EMF where we would expect very little to be detectable as photons outside the resonant network. What defines the production and radiation of photons from the coupling of energy between conductors - and how is this determined in a causally consistent manner? My theory is that "time" or "causality" is asynchronous and correlated to frequency/wavelength. IE - if you had a 10hz signal, all things within that wavelength (or possibly more) are invariant of time and happen as one causal packet within its context. A 10khz signal would have a thousand events (kind of - I'm not sure we have words to adequately describe the idea) that would, for all things relative to that 10hz signal, be instant/immediate/invariant. Not that it particularly solves any problems to look at it that way, but I think that is the direction things will go as we assess the distinction between behaviors.

[@Robert_McGarry_Poems]

We put current into some device... Electron changes orbital, gives off photon... Photons are massless and experience no time. Photon travels, relative to us and our observation of it, not it's own self reference. And then photon interacts with a different electron causing it to also change orbitals, which is what we measure. Hmm, very interesting train of thought you put forward. My instant thought is exactly what you point out, how does it know what electrons to re interact with at the end of it's journey? Seeing as it must come into some form of contact with many different ones along the way...

[@Aim54Delta]

@@Robert_McGarry_Poems Generally, this. Particularly with the strength of coupling seen in transformer windings, such as wireless phone chargers. I'll just throw out a number - one megahertz as a design frequency that's right there at the edge of what is usually considered RF and we can rather easily play with it using standard components and prototyping while illustrating the phenomenon. If I set up a coil of wire to resonate at 1 megahertz - then take another coil designed to resonate at 1 megahertz and set it just a couple meters away... the two will transfer energy between each other with over 70% efficiency "just by accident" with minimal engineering put into it. The idea that a photon is being radiated by the primary coil seems dubious because if we were to place a laser light source with spherical or even just split lensing, even a 100% efficient photocell would only ever see, at best, half the energy, and more likely a ratio that falls under the inverse square law of area over distance. The unassuming transformer (and electric motor, for that matter) behaves in a manner that would seem to indicate that locality has been violated, as the energy is transferred to another resonant coil without being subject to the inverse square law, at least at first. This begs the question of if a photon is involved in mediating the exchange, at all (and I am inclined to say no). A photon is described as a disruption in the electric field with a 90 degree out of phase matching disruption in the magnetic field. This is not unlike how voltage (electric field) and current (magnetic field) operate in an electric circuit. I would make the argument that an RC tank circuit is taking the place of a photon, and vice-versa, free space somehow acts as a resonant circuit under certain circumstances (and does so as an ideal circuit). I would further postulate that this is what creates space, or the illusion of it, in the first place (where spin of an electron creates rules regarding the behavior of that space or the energy levels in it). However, what would follow logically were this the case is that while the speed of information exchange would not be faster than the speed of light, the metric of space would be variable by frequency. For example, if we were looking at a 2d matrix, we could extend out to one wavelength a radius wherein electromagnetic energy would couple without a photon. Placing a resonant structure to share that radius on a tangent eliminates any photon radiation (and it may be possible to do this out to multiple wavelengths because there are near and far field coupling effects that have been demonstrated at several wavelengths). The point being that whereas blue light would experience radiative effects at far smaller distances, red and microwave light would couple their energy over much greater distances before becoming radiative.

[@Robert_McGarry_Poems]

@@Aim54Delta Ok... I get most of that... Albeit, it's slightly over my head. But my first thought is that we always assume photons have to be small. Micro small. What inherently makes the photon small? If the distance matters, maybe it's more of a node or standing wave type phenomenon. Where tuning is more about locating the resonance node inside of the second coil in a particular arrangement. I have to ask, if there is no electromagnetic interactions, what exactly is coupling? The example that instantly comes to mind is the 22cm emission photons. But again, you make an interesting point about measuring emission, my only thought there is that if it's polarized light, doing the measurement, then you would only see half the wave.

[@TheClarityofTarotandMeditation]

Very happy to have discovered this channel! Have liked and subscribed. Have a great day! 😊

[@TsjuunTze]

Well done!

[@DennisAldridge]

I strongly agree with all who complemented you on your clear and concise descriptions of these mind-bending ideas. I have had an idea about the issue of reverse temporal relationships for a few years and have never felt I had a good opportunity to ask a knowledgeable person about this. Maybe this is the time... String theory implies that we may live in a universe that has many more than the three or four dimensions we normally think of. I know that string theory has its detractors, but if the extra dimensions are really there, entanglement may be a lot simpler to explain. If those "entangled particles" turn out to be "two faces of the same particle" that jut out into two points in our observable three-dimensional space, then the idea that they can communicate with one another instantaneously isn't so far fetched. Even if they are different particles that happen to be tethered together through a tiny dimension, the concept of virtually instantaneous communication is still easy to buy. Since I wasn't able to review all of your comnents, I do not know that no one else has posed this question. I apologize if it has been asked and answered. If not, what do you think about the idea of other dimensions being involved here?

[@dogfoot1874]

"Remembering the future is the key to unlock the past"

[@animetldr4044]

He is claiming exactly that, just that extra dimension being time, to us we experience the time dimension only 1 way but the particle may be interacting in both ways hence affecting it's outcome , which to us seems instantaneous

[@kinpandun2464]

Like the see-saw examlle another commenter posted. If the "entagled" particles are actually just one particle in 2 different places, then a change of state one one 'side' of the entanglement would naturally have the other 'side' take the opposite state at the same time.

[@tinear4]

I’m glad to hear that physicists are actively investigating this - it parallels the theological question of divine foreknowledge vs free will, which has been an active subject of debate for centuries.

[@grumpylibrarian]

Right now, the only available alternative we can conceive of to determinism is randomness, and I don't accept that randomness is equivalent to will. For libertarian free will to exist, we need a completely new mechanic.

[@blakehelgoth5247]

There is no divine foreknowledge. God is outside of time as it creator. God also cause us too freely choose.

[@grumpylibrarian]

@@blakehelgoth5247 According to...? Not even the bible says that.

[@gtw4546]

@@blakehelgoth5247 God is outside time as its Creator, but that means that He can SEE what our choices WILL be (foreknowledge) even as we are free to make them.

[@gtw4546]

@@grumpylibrarian Time is part of the creation (subject to mass, gravity, acceleration) so the Creator must exist outside of time. Time started with the creation - "In the beginning" are the very first words of the Bible.

[@MarkDaynes]

Super interesting, thank you 🙏

[@tonybates7870]

I wish I understood this stuff - it sounds absolutely intriguing. God knows how many qualifications I'd need to get my head around it.

[@TheRealNCYank]

If the wave function actually does collapse in different directions based upon which direction it is measured, this would allow instantaneous communication over great distances, as long as the directions are agreed upon beforehand. For example, if team A wins, measure up and down, and if team B wins, measure side to side. The other particle's collapse would carry with it the information about which team won.

[@APaleDot]

It's been shown you can't transmit information this way. Even if you measure left-right on one end, that only tells you the other end's spin if they were to measure left-right. The people on the other end still don't know how you measured.

[@auraandtheowls]

This was such a wonderful, thought out, greatly animated, thought. Man. If you ever doubt yourself or get any kind of comment that makes you feel bad, just remember. At least from what I’ve found, you make physics so accessible and explain things in such a way that wherever your understanding of physics lies, you still walk away with something and it’s so digestible.

[@wyattnoise]

I never truly understood entanglement (and how particles are entangled) until this video and you made it super simple.

[@nightmareTomek]

He didn't, it's still convoluted as fk. They making it sound like it's some mystical thing happening in physics that no mortal can understand. While in fact entanglement only means that if you know the properties of one particle, you can conclude the properties of the other. For example like this: spin(particle_a) = -spin(particle_b) Veeery simple. They're like mirrored, that's all. But that doesn't fill a 10 minute video. So he actually made it more complicated.

[@ssssssssssss885]

Conservation laws imply entanglement. Like if pair production produces two particles of half spin from a high energy integer spin bosson, the spins of the resulting particles must be equal in absolute value and oposite. But one doesn't know which one is which until observing one of them. This is what spooked Einstein. And no, no one really understands this as Feynman famously observed.

[@jessicapatton2688]

I have heard this before. I had a spiritual awakening then did the work to get there. I as totally healed of everything and it happened 20 years ago.

[@progressor4ward85]

It's not so crazy to imagine if all of the particals were entangled. And their counterparts were always in the opposite position, (peak, valley) within in the wave.

[@stumpywest1652]

A few things spring to mind. 1 something travelling at the speed of light would from it's point of view be in all places at once. 2 from the point of view of an outside observer time would pass at people would normally expect, that photon has taken time to travel 3 as travelling at the speed of light means you're at all points at once, the observation measurements took place at the same time as your splitting from your entangled partner photon, hence the spooky action at a distance

[@lawshorizon]

Electrons have the same kind of correlations but do not travel at the speed of light. ... Good try though.

[@Milesprowerthegamer]

As someone with no physics background whatsoever and just a surface-level understanding, I'm reminded of how when something is travelling at the speed of light, from that reference point it looks as though time for everything else has stopped. Maybe photons can communicate retrocausally somehow because time, for everything but them, essentially is stopped? I'm not the best at articulating what I'm thinking but hopefully this makes some sort of sense.

[@supercommie]

I've seen a lot of hacks on KZbin, who are clearly not physicists doing "videos" on Retrocausality, so I want to personally thank you for explaining to me what it actually is.

[@newstreat4275]

His concept of reverse entropy is idiotic though.. quantum collapses into the past would only allow us to see events from that moment forward.

[@ShannonMcDowell71]

For retrocausality to work wouldn't it imply that the past not only still exists but it's also malleable? While it's an interesting concept I somehow find superdeterminism easier to accept.

[@DrBenMiles]

I think I agree

[@BenMitro]

@@DrBenMiles I think you agreed in the past.

[@SystemsPlanet]

Wait. He agreed before reading your comment

[@thechosenegg9340]

If it's a hard deterministic universe, then the past (and future) couldn't be changed, even with retrocausality. It would be a fixed system and we're just riding along.

[@elisasshift2940]

@ Yeah that would be really, really sick! Sadly, as far as we know, according to the heisenberg uncertainty principle, you can't know everything about an atom at once. But it's still fun to think about! And even if it's limited, we could try to build a computer that gets really close to it. We're already building computersimulations all the time!

[@stevejamson]

Hey Doctor Ben, you're definitely my new favourite scientist. These are really complex ideas, and yet your cool and calm way of explaining the concepts are actually starting to sink in with me, even though I'm only a simple graduate. Thank you so much for this channel!

[@garycole715]

It happens to us all the time. Our minds adjust automatically to make it seem in a casual manner without us knowing.

[@qcjoey2000]

Poetic!! Love it!❤

[@markaspiazu]

Has there ever been an experiment where one photon was observed at the same time by two observers: one observing for up/down spin and another observing for left/right spin?

[@CodyAdams-pf9un]

I'm pretty sure they haven't done yet. "Observer" means the particle collided and interacted with something, and that collision can only check one direction of spin. To check another direct would require the particle to interact woth something else right afterwards. Both directions cannot be checked at the exact same moment

[@ILLUSIONgroup]

I think that splitting a particle is like we are making a mirroring of it and not a entangled-copy. So they are originally in a sort of mirror-state and when you measure one of them you can already know the state of the other

[@hillwalker8741]

I like that time goes from left to right - much more intuitive

[@Jar.in.a.Bottle]

We are still measuring that which is the easiest for us to still be measuring. I would definitely assume that the nearer to super-deterministic stuff's properties we are measuring, the less efforts and energies it takes to get a non-noise result. Therefore, super-determinism type stuff is what we can, and will, measure first and foremost, and build logic systems around. It looks like it might be quite some time before this changes. Until then, I guess we will remain not yet able to best approach the realms of super-deterministic dichotomies. Too bad, but true.

[@BenMitro]

You can think of the photon (or any other particle that can be entangled) as existing simultaneously in our 4D spacetime as well as on another 2+D plane on which the two entangled particles are co-located and hence can communicate their state instantaneously on the plane they are co-located in. In some ways this idea is an analogue of the time travelling backwards idea.

[@A_Stereotypical_Guy]

They don't communicate. At all. That's not what entanglement means.

[@BenMitro]

@@A_Stereotypical_GuyYou are right - wrong term.

[@A_Stereotypical_Guy]

@@BenMitro don't let the woo of people like ben miles get you brother. If you want actual quantum mechanics educational content go watch Sabine hossenfelder

[@fishbrainLTD]

My view is there is only one single photon. It is stretched out across spacetime spanning the higgs boson determining atomic states through observation (i.e. quick, god's here, look busy). In fact, I would argue everything is made of light, and solid atomic structures are actually a function of the way light energy condenses into mass when it's velocity is slowed. I have zero evidence for any of this. Just thinking loudly.

[@sutanugupta2836]

Very interesting and well explained.

[@RodentHunter]

New subscriber here. I will always hit the like button even before the video begins which seems to coincide with your topic of discussion here. How did I know I would like the content of your video before watching it?

[@mikedebell2242]

If the photon when split, each part takes it's orientation but is unknown to us until it's measured makes more sense to me. My thought is if you could measure it twice and come up with a different orientation on the measure photon and find the other changed then that would really be weird.🎉

[@caseytailfly]

This is precisely what experiments have shown is not happening, which is what makes it so interesting. The universe isn’t compelled to fundamentally work in a way that makes sense to us. No one could figure out a way to test this until John Bell, but the technology to test it thoroughly enough to fully disprove hidden variables wasn’t possible until recently. Hence the recent Nobel prize.

[@kevinpruett6424]

What if the other half of photon is it's shadow we've yet to figure out measurement for? Aka it's "root/seed"

[@TimRobertsen]

In order to not break the timeloop, I pressed the Like-button ;) Could you please make a video regarding how the second law of thermodynamics doesn't allow Time Symmetry. It seems very counterintuitive. If time was to move backwards, then entropy would "move" backwards/allowing entropy to decrease.

[@juimymary9951]

Actually entropy can decrease, it's just extremely unlikely

[@TimRobertsen]

​@@juimymary9951 True, it's all probability. It just would seem a bit odd if quantum entanglement would rely on the very slim chance of entropy decreasing at that moment :p But, hey, it's quantum dynamics, it's just a box of weirdness:p

[@fishbrainLTD]

​@@drbuckley1 from your perspective, sure. Just like from the perspective of a skydiver, upwards travel is impossible. Now swap the height axis for the time axis.

[@grumpylibrarian]

Dr. Sean Carroll's model has time as a function of entropy, not entropy as a function of time. The "arrow of time" moves from low entropy to high entropy because there are fewer permutations available in the direction of less entropy and more permutations available in the direction of less entropy. And we've reached the limit of my knowledge in trying to explain how that relates to the second law of thermodynamics having a thing or two to say regarding whether time symmetry is possible, but by golly I'm sure there's something related to it.

[@TimRobertsen]

@@grumpylibrarian I am very sure that my understanding for Time Symmetry and thermodynamics is wrong in all kinds of ways :p Miles is really good at explaining all kinds of stuff, so it would be really great to hear his thoughts and understanding of these subjects :)

[@user-hf6vy8xc4i]

Really like your light set up 👍

[@techbricks5300]

The way I think of this: Light does not experience time. A photon is created, has an interaction then is absorbed, all in a timeless instant. One individual photons existence of 3 events happen all at once. And the faster you travel through space, the less you travel through time. Unless you’re massless then you don’t travel through time at all. I have a hypothesis about the fine structure of space, where it’s an infinite set of expanding spheres, all overlapping, radiating isotopically, and light goes along for the ride, always staying on the sphere it was created on… It’s a bit like both the Many Worlds and the Pilot Wave ideas. Anything heavier than light, with mass, will have these spheres expanding past it, so it gets dragged along but also left behind, both in space and time. Light is always the furthest ahead in the future anything can be, on the new edge of space, where anything with mass has the space expanding past it, and so it experiences time. More mass means a slower rate of time is experienced. (More time). Until you get to an event horizon where (to an outside observer) objects seem to get frozen in time. (Infinite time).

[@markkennedy9767]

One concept I find interesting is why we remember the past and not the future. Or why can't predict the future like we can "retrodict" the past. There's a seemingly fundamental asymmetry there. And people might say, well, duh, it's because you have direct memories of the past (which relate to directly experiencing the past with our senses). But one could arguably develop a similar sense for future events (it stretches the notion of "sense" but its still something I wonder about). Reasons for the asymmetry are the way physics works (entropy leading to a flow of time) and how our brains are set up in this physical context. But on the face of it, it's not impossible for an entity (an oracle of some sort) to transcend these limitations and be able to equally predict future as well as past.

[@timhaldane7588]

Probably for the same reason we can only impact future events. I happen to think that the arrow of time is an emergent phenomenon that is in some way deeply related to quantum decoherence. Imagine a river current or a moving crowd. A single water molecule / person is likely to eventually end up getting nudged in the direction that everything else is going. The more people or molecules you chain together, the more that probability increases. Our brains and bodies are composed of too many particles to avoid being carried along the current.

[@keepitreal2902]

deja vu might be a memory of the future.

[@kevinpruett6424]

Because we have limbs/sinew fashioned only for a specific stream current - not wings to lift out of our element...

[@akamalov]

Excellent show! What happens if two cameras observe two different properties at two different photons? Camera A looks at photon 1 for up or down spin. Camera B looks at photon 2 for left or right spin?

[@ladle3000]

Retrocausality to me is more comfortable than random instant communication. All things affecting all things in all directions makes the most "sense". Good video

[@marcalvarez4890]

Great video....Subscribed!

[@Aupheromones]

I think it would be more accurate to describe it as hidden constants than hidden variables, but otherwise, I'm on-board with the deterministic universe, I think that our observable universe is an incomprehensibly small part of the bigger picture and if we were actually able to zoom it out far enough we'd see the causes of our effects.

[@HarryHeck2020]

Well you would be wrong.

[@Aupheromones]

@@HarryHeck2020 hey man, thanks for that valuable contribution to the discussion

[@HarryHeck2020]

@@Aupheromones No problem. The "bigger picture" is because of you. You won't find it out there, because 'out there' only exists in an infinite haze of possibilities without you.

[@bigboy2217]

@@HarryHeck2020 meanwhile I’m just trying to find who asked

[@HarryHeck2020]

Everyone.

[@8k_k8kloud48]

This is actually great progress. We're going in a positive direction 🙂 Now lets make the next step simple - the main reason why all this seems confusing is in the understanding of Time itself. The energy wave that becomes a physical particle in the 3rd dimension (such as the photon) exists in a timeless state. Quantum goes beyond what we call Time (4th dimension), it is an eternal now, where that particle exists both in what we call past and future simultaneously. 😉

[@davidgoldstein1526]

Photons decay over time. Photons, traveling at the speed of light, are not in a timeless universe. Their clocks stop; time, however, marches on

[@lostwave4880]

Agreed. This really appears to be the crux of the issue, confusing Matter (or the perception of matter) with Time. Matter experiences time, wave functions do not. Any particular wave function already exists everywhere all at once, otherwise it simply could not be a "wave" (a wave can only exist/be-identified by the examination/comparison of any one of its "parts" with its "other parts" elsewhere in "space"). A wave function may define intensity with distance, and/or with time, which essentially then equates distance with time. So if there is no distance, there is no time, and if there is no time, then there is no distance. Any energy in the universe that exists as a wave/probability function would not then appear to experience time or distance, it just really is everywhere all at once. If you choose to view things like photons as "particles" then all sorts of confusion ensues, including the confusion of it taking time for particles to travel/communicate between each other, or concluding that a "distance" came into existence between them simply due to the passage of a certain amount of time. But if there is no time, aka no distance, other than that introduced by beings such as ourselves who are witnessing everything from the macroscopic scale at which time/distance come into apparent existence, due to ourselves making observations from the perspective of beings composed of particles of matter travelling at less than the speed of light, then the discrepancies in the observations should theoretically become clear. Maybe the trouble lies with the "particle" physicists who require the existence of "particles" to substantiate their purpose? ... where are the "wave functionists"? lol And maybe a more interesting question is the if and how exactly wave functions come into and out of existence, same as the if and how exactly particles appear to come into and out of existence, let alone how transitions from one to the other or interactions between the two occur seemingly so regularly. Seems to me most wave/particle interactions behave much more like additive-subtractive wave function interactions, than like particle collisions. I'd also suspect then that what appears to us to be "Matter/particles" travelling at less than the speed of light, and that so heavily biases human views and understandings, may not be Matter at all. Time and matter may both be only artifacts, and only the energy in the wave functions may be "real".

[@8k_k8kloud48]

@@lostwave4880 I love the way you think 😉 For now, the answer to your question regarding how wave functions and particles seem to come in and out of existence, requires a new understanding of what reality is. First it is important to understand that every wave has its own vibratory frequency wich can be measured in cycles. A full cycle, measured from our physical perspective, would be the time it takes for the wave to go from its highest to lowest points (and vice versa). Knowing this, we then need to look at what "real" is. From my perspective, the human perception is able to detect a certain range of frequency and every wave that has compatibility with that range is observed has "physical". This means that particles are not simply existing one moment and ceasing to exist in the other. They always exist but only seem to manifest in our physical reality when their vibrational frequency is compatible with our perception. They are waves, but when they enter our perception we see them has particles. The speed of light, as an example, is the threshold. Beyond the speed of light, we break the limit of our perception of reality and Time as we know it no longer applies. Basically, Time is an illusion that exists between a range of frequency that is compatible with the human 3D experience, so from our perspective time and space are real as an experience, but beyond our range of perception they are illusions. If there is no Time beyond our perception it would mean that everything that exists is eternal, and within eternity, every wave that vibrates between certain frequencies will "enter" the "real illusion" we call Time and Space.

[@theslay66]

Some more fuel for your thoughs : Time is not a fundamental property of our universe, but an emerging property from the interactions of waves/particles. What each interaction does is only a matter of perspective. Be it a photon giving birth to a matter/antimatter pair, or having this pair annihilate to birth a photon, it is the same interaction, only seen by different observers. However according to the perspective you chose, those interactions will either increase or decrease entropy. But in order to be able to observe a change, you have to form memories, so you can perceive that events have a "before" and an "after". Forming memories implies spending energy, which implies an increase in entropy. So we can only perceive events from the perspective of an observer who observes a constant increase of entropy in the universe. Time is just a product of our own perception. Now what this implies is indeed rather difficult to wrap our head around, because we don't have the hability to think without a notion of time. We can see events as occuring simultaneously everywhere in the universe, or see things as all existing for all eternity, but be it simultaneity or eternity, this all doesn't make sense anyway without the concept of time. This is a rather hard stumbling block, because our intuition cannot help us grasp what it does really mean, we have no experience at all that can even remotely relate to such conditions.

[@loreermejo]

4th option: it's not the particles communicating nor interacting with the past. It's your observation that's fixing a single reality for you the observer, while you had actually been living in a sea of unexpressed possibilities until the very moment you forced the universe to pick a fixed state.

[@jamesgrey13]

Time happens all at once, and our brains sort through it!

[@sneckim]

This video was the first of yours I’ve seen. I watch many videos of this nature. When I happened upon this one I was immediately struck by the quality of your speaking voice, believe it or not. I am not a learned physicist. I am a lay member of the public who is simply fascinated by the subject and loves learning more through the KZbin medium. Consequently, since it can be a rather technical and complicated subject, the quality of the speech is something I consider critical. I can’t tell you how many videos I’ve tuned out because of poor speech quality. Your voice tone is clear, well modulated and pleasing to the ear. Thus I enjoyed WHAT you said, because I enjoyed HOW you said it. I’m now newly subscribed and look forward to watching more of your videos. Thanks.

[@nickdemunguia1107]

I remember that on the final episode of Star Trek TNG, they dealt with a concept called anti-time. Is this an actual concept that has been explored in physics? Or was it just something creative the writers came up with? I know Star Trek borrows alot from actual scientific theories and hypotheses.

[@alanbagshaw7280]

Possibly the best like button request I have ever heard.

[@ConsciousExpression]

To me as a software engineer who has dabbled in hardware, the universe seems very much like a machine. Quantum fields are the building blocks of the machine much like RAM in a computer, and it's reused just like we reuse RAM in a computer simulation. You can think of the quantum fields like "textures" in computer graphics simulations. A lot of different objects in the system may reuse the same texture, to provide an illusion of much more "stuff" than there actually is. If you change the texture of an object, it changes everywhere else in the simulation "instantly." No information is passed from one place to another, it's simply that the fundamental "stuff" the object is made out of is used in lots of other places, so it's used to "render" the object. In the same sense, if quantum fields are the way that the universe uses to "render" physical objects, everything starts to make a lot of sense. In other words, yes, the fields have no definite properties until you measure them. That measurement is the "rendering" process of our reality, creating an illusion of lots and lots of "stuff" but really the only stuff is all reused throughout the universe, to provide an illusion of detail without needing actual storage for the detail. I know this all sounds kinda crazy but I think we are going to be surprised some day what science can do, along the same lines. Someday we will build universe-simulating machines that use these same principles to create vast, artificial universes with properties so much like our own, it won't be possible to tell the difference between the simulation and what we call reality. At that point I think most people will agree with me that our universe is likely a similar construct.

[@bshannon7501]

To me, it seems quite intuitive. I'm open to alternative interpretations, but here's mine after watching this video. At the moment of the photon's creation, its spin is in a superposition of and sent on its way to the SPDCC (Spontaneous Parametric Down Conversion Crystal). There, it is split into two entangled photons that then travel some distances D1 and D2 before being perceived and collapsing at their respective sensors. From a locally real perspective, it appears that the sensor at the minimum distance (MINIMUM(D1,D2)) would be the first to measure and consequently collapse the states of the photon on both paths to either the set of ↕ or ↔. Once it knows which set of information it has gained from the photon, anything or anyone at that location in spacetime also knows that the other location received information of the same set. However, this decision seems to be made instantaneously. This perspective makes sense if you consider the time dilation that the photon experiences. When we see a photon from the sun, it takes eight minutes to reach us from our frame of reference. But from the photon's perspective, as its speed is c, its journey from the moment it was created in the sun to arriving on Earth is instantaneous. Similarly, the entangled photons' journeys happen and "pair" multiple moments in spacetime together as the same instant because there is a frame of reference defining them as the same moment. In general, we can gain knowledge of the photon's spin at multiple points in what seems like the future, but these points are all somewhat related in spacetime. This knowledge is obtained in the same instant from the photon's frame of reference. However, we cannot know the information contained in both sets of spin. The underlying principle for why we cannot know all of this information is due to the values in superposition corresponding to two values, such as position and momentum, that cannot both be known at the same time. When solving for a position in the future using Schrödinger's equations, the true answers are in complex form, and we do not have access to imaginary dimensions yet. We can, however, take the absolute value of the wavefunction over the bases of a maximal set of non-commuting observables and square it to obtain an answer with no imaginary values that still has practical applications for our reality, which is the probability distribution of the particle's whereabouts and state. Unfortunately, the true nature of the universe is locked behind doors we can't open by not understanding all of the photon's information at once. Nevertheless, we can still do amazing things, like manipulate known wavefunctions in superposition to make it so only one possible value from a set is left, which is the basis for the exciting discoveries in the world of quantum computing! Written by me and grammatical errors and editing done by ChatGPT-4

[@davidowen1191]

Wow that's the first time I've seen any comment edited by chat gpt-4. Well done very impressive and honest 👏

[@openworldtools]

It totally makes sense! If the photon travels at the speed of light, everything happens instantaneously for it. So the moment is measured is identical with the moment it splits. It doesn't send information back in time, it just happens at the same time.

[@grandfrosty]

If you need someone else's explanation to underpin your understanding, how will you ever interpret your dream?

[@undercoveragent9889]

Sorry but that is not true. Photons _do_ experience time. Are you seriously suggesting that the photons constituting the CMB radiation have not aged? Are those photons anything like the photons they were when they were first emitted? No; time and space have diluted the photons energy so much that their momentum is almost down to zero. We know that the wavelength of a photon is proportional to its frequency. It isn't unreasonable to say that at the quantum level, energy and frequency are equivalent in the same way that mass and energy are equivalent at the atomic level. So, let's imagine the journey of one of those photons that we detect as CMBR. Let's suppose that when it was emitted, the photon's wavelength was in the x-ray part of the spectrum. Leaving aside the amplitude of the wave, we could express the wavelength in terms of the number of Planck lengths it occupies along the direction of travel. Let's say that the length of the wave turns out to be 1,000 Planck lengths for the purpose of this example. This means that the entire energy of the photon is contained in a space between two points that are 1,000 Planck lengths apart. Now, at some point in that photon's journey toward our detector, its wavelength will have doubled. That means that the entire energy of the photon is now contained in a space between two points that are 2,000 Planck lengths apart and it would be indistinguishable from another photon which has been emitted with only half the energy of the original x-ray, right? They say that the wavelength increases due to expansion of space and I'm happy to go with that but the fact is, the photon is experiencing a process of being _stretched_ and pulled apart as if the front of the wave accelerates away from its rear. Think about it... The photon starts off at 1,000 Planck units long an then its length increases to 1,001 units long... Do you think that the _new_ Planck unit carries any of the payload? Yes, it does; the energy of the photon 'leaks' into the extra space being introduced by expansion; the photon is _losing_ energy. Then to 1,002 units, more leakage, and on and on, 1,999 to 2,000; the energy is distributed all across the new length. I mean, imagine detecting the photon at that stage - Would we see that all the information relating to the photon is represented by only 1,000 of the Planck units with the extra 1,000 Planck units remaining empty of energy? You know, like it has been sliced into 1,000 samples and then had a further 1,000 empty samples inserted inserted between each pair of samples? No, that's not what we get; we get a perfectly continuous analogue signal. And when that signal arrives at our detector, it's wavelength _still_ looks like a sine wave. I have an analogy that puts my position in a nutshell with regard to how when the photon was emitted it packed a real punch but when it was detected, it hardly registers - The emitted photon is like a strong young warrior going to sleep as he goes off to battle but by the time he wakes up on arrival at the battlefield, he lacks the energy to even un-sheath his sword. I myself can travel at the speed of sleep on a journey from 04:00 to 11:00 in an instant but I assure you, I went through a process of change as I traveled. Or, think of a guitar; you pluck a string and it starts to vibrate. What happens when you tune the string downward? Its frequency drops and its sustain increases. Increase the pitch, the opposite happens. Photons are the same. Or, think in terms of refraction: the photon started with one index when it was emitted and finished with another when it was absorbed. I simply cannot see any way in which that photon has _not_ experienced the ravages of time. That's what _I_ think anyway. :)

[@lefthandedelite]

​@@undercoveragent9889 That is brilliant, I never thought of a photon skipping across a lake of space-time like that.

[@Smile_its_a_good_day]

What are the physics of perception ?, is it possible that there are other dimensions we can’t perceive ?, could this relate to entanglement? Thank you and enjoy watching your videos very much !

[@kevinpruett6424]

Yea it could easily be tethered outside our Timestream

[@yoaaauuiohheee7726]

Good video thank you for helping me

[@tourdeforce2881]

So clear and understandable

[@ElecTrev]

But as photons are travelling at the speed of light they don't experience time, right? So they don't have to send the information "back in time", they are just affected by it. Or doesn't that make any sense?

[@justinb2630]

It does make sense.

[@draquelin]

If you allow for boundlessly expanding entanglement (many worlds), the problem of locality vanishes. When you look at one entangled particle from a pair, no ftl communication or time travel is necessary. You simply cut off your access to the remote paired particle that disagrees with your measurements.

[@guitarszen]

The many worlds interpretation is a mathematical idea and nothing more. It is the same idea used in things like string theory and quantum gravity, neither of which has had any tangible results to show they are valid.

[@alterecho8261]

4:00 "Sound, basically, is a relationship between vibrations in the air and ears. When the tree falls it makes the air vibrate. If there is anywhere around, an ear, there will be a noise, and if not there won't be, but there will be a vibration in the air." -Alan Watts

[@favourite1944]

Looks like I was super determined to hit the subscribe button

[@j.f.7509]

I find this very interesting! Perhaps it's not so much a matter of time, but rather of space?

[@ericmichel3857]

Space and time are the same thing, you can't have one without the other, hence the more appropriate term Spacetime. It is a more accurate description of our universe, whenever you move through space, you are also moving through time. Just like when you approach a large mass that curves spacetime, not only is the space distorted so is time, take a black hole as an extreme example of this effect.

[@IntoEverything]

:))

[@IntoEverything]

@@ericmichel3857 Hardly. Space is. Time isn't. ... "Space-Time" is just Academic razzle-dazzle... a silly contradiction meant to confuse.

[@ericmichel3857]

@@IntoEverything I have to respectfully disagree. Space and time are in fact the same thing. You can't have space without time, nor could you have time without space. Why? Well if there were no space then there would be no movement, everything would be and happen all at once. By the same logic, you cannot have space without time, because time is required to move from one point in space to another, no? You can say our entire perception of space and time is some sort of construct, but you can't say one is and the other is not. It is literally impossible to have one without the other. I mean obviously you can say it, but it is nonsense. It is like trying to say black exists but white does not, or up exists but not down, or cold exists but not hot. How could you know one without the other? They provide context relative to one another. Oh hey! Relativity, I might be onto something here. :)

[@Kmax_817]

If the particles choose their spin and go back in time to tell their antiparticle the determined spin, doesn’t that mean the particle had always existed spinning that way, therefore meaning that it could never choose and go back in time to tell the other to spin that way? Ive probably got this all wrong, but i would like some insight.

[@drbuckley1]

I think you have it entirely correct. Particles, of course, don't "make choices." Neither do human beings, if you believe in a deterministic Universe. The rhetorical use of the word, "choice," unnecessary complicates the physics, especially for those who deny "free will."

[@KozyKubGam3r]

Yes hitting the like button was already pre determined on a quantum level.. lol! It really was tho. Makes sense seeing as energy spins in circles and what goes around has to come back around. Our future has already happened and whatever happened spins back around effecting our past and present. It’s hard to comprehend but to me it’s what makes sense.

[@calebrinard5403]

The explanation of the experiment set-up left me with several questions: Why only check for one direction? Why not check for both up and down? Why would anything always spin perfectly up? What even is perfectly up? Does the observation action not interfere with the photon's movement?

[@simon4life764]

Einstein believed that past, present and future are equally real because of his theories of GR. Idk what it means but maybe Retrocausality can be explained via GR? I'm not so sure. Great channel BTW, you earned a sub

[@drbuckley1]

If one believes in "retrocausality," then one must also believe in "free will." I'm skeptical about both.

[@fishbrainLTD]

He also didn't believe spooky action at a distance.

[@rainertheraven7813]

Einstein believed in the Block Universe.

[@derzaubererkonig]

What if entropy could be backwards, just imagine it to be like going from disorder to order at quantum levels by imagining a vacuum cleaner picking up spread unorganised dust particles and taking them to orderly organization?? Then it would be time symmetric..😅

[@hedgehog3180]

Entropy being about disorder is a bit of a misunderstanding. Entropy refers to the energy that will always be lost in a system that is doing work. Disorder is a consequence of this but is not itself entropy. Basically in order for us to perform work we need to have a system that we can extract energy from and that means some of it being at different energy levels, like a weight sitting high up or petrol that hasn't been burned yet. Those things contain a lot of potential energy that we can extract and use to perform work. However in order to do that work those things have to be brought down to the same energy level as the rest of the system, the weight has to fall to the ground and the petrol has to be burned. In doing so we will create something that is more "mixed" and therefore seems "disorderly", the weight no long is distinct from the ground and the petrol has been turned into CO2 and H2O. Now it is completely possible to reverse those processes, you can lift the weight back up and we can synthesize the petrol from raw CO2 and H2O but in doing so we will have to expend energy, and we'll have to expend more energy than we got out of those systems. This is where entropy actually comes in, the reason why there isn't a 1:1 energy conversion in both directions is because in all cases where we use energy to perform work some of the energy will be lost to heat, a petrol engine loses about 60% of the energy in the petrol to heat meanwhile in a pulley system with a weight some of the energy will be lost to heat in the friction of the rope and with the air. Some amount of this heat energy will always be unrecoverable and can never be used to perform work and that is what entropy is. It's the fraction of energy in a system that is permanently lost. This is also where the term "heat death of the universe" comes from. Disorder is more an apparent consequence of entropy but is not itself entropy and the end state of the universe would be one where all energy is distributed perfectly evenly throughout the universe, which is hardly a state you could call disorderly. A key realization from this is that it's perfectly possibly to lower entropy in one area but that always results in an increase somewhere else because you need to use energy to do so. This should sorta answer your question, in order for your idea to be possible then energy would need to somehow appear out of nowhere and that's breaks the First law of Thermodynamics. Also it's worth noting that on the scale of quantum physics terms like "order" and "disorder" really don't make sense, disorderly to us might be something like mixing two different liquids but quantum physics is on the subatomic scale so on that scale you can't really distinguish between like pure water and water with something else mixed in. Also if energy did start appearing randomly to reverse entropy then firstly: It wouldn't actually decrease the total amount of entropy in the universe, it would merely decrease the fraction of energy in the universe lost to entropy and secondly: it would then break time symmetry in another way because now we suddenly have energy appearing out of nowhere in the future, which is obviously not a reversible process, or I guess in this case play in forwards. It would require that somehow the total amount of energy in the universe increases over time, which for one we would have noticed and secondly gives a whole host of issues for all of physics. And just to be clear there's no way to reverse entropy without the use of energy, it basically follows from it's definition as lost heat energy.

[@drbuckley1]

​@@hedgehog3180 One can reduce local entropy by drawing energy from a distant source, but one cannot reverse entropy.

[@derzaubererkonig]

Thanks, that cleared it all up

[@Obad87]

I often think of time like going down a hill with no breaks. You can't go back only forward. We can map out how we reach the bottom but we are all headed forward in time. In a way though I can predict and play out my own future. If I want to be a doctor I can plan to go to medical school and do what it takes to reach that goal. In a way that future image of myself helped guide my past to get where I want to go. Once I get there though there's no going back.

[@theeclectic2919]

Everything we've done and experienced has already happened, and so has an infinite number of different versions of that experience. Our brains in the "present" time are just trying to catch up to those experiences.

[@asphaltannihilator157]

Yeah no

[@theeclectic2919]

@@asphaltannihilator157 Yeah, you know nothing.

[@brendancaulfield970]

I remember there being talk in the early naughties about "temporal quantum entanglement", where two teams did not communicate but performed measurements and experiments separated in time on entangled particles. If I recall correctly, the measurements were taken taken earlier on one side of the entangled pairs - then the other team perturbed the other side. When the teams were both finished, they compared notes, and in every case, the results recorded earlier in time corresponded with the expected results of the perturbations made later, even though the exact nature of the perturbation applied in each case was not decided until after the other team had made their measurement. Is this concept related to those findings or am I completely misremembering the findings?

[@badreality2]

Is this what causes "Mandela Effects"?

[@brendancaulfield970]

@@badreality2 I doubt it. The Mandela effect is the claim that the subject has unwittingly traveled from a parallel timeline where history unfolded subtly differently, but most people just put it down to the fallibility of human memory. Temporal quantum entanglement happens on a per-particle basis and on large scales, likely averages out to no significant impact. I also don't know how long the time frames of the experiments were, but I have a hunch they were short.

[@leodawn5913]

The 90s for me was definitely the naughties!!!

[@JamJellyFishJam]

yeah thats an experimental result disproving causlity. the n(3) body problem implies retrocauslity, too. with 3+ black hole orbital systems (think how many our universe has lol), 2 and below are stable causality wise, but 3+ orbiting eachother causes the equations to work in a way where the positions cannot be reverse in the time axis once moved, as such the past information is sufficiently "destroyed", or more accurately, retro-causlizied what the past is. Essentially how time works is you go from point Point A to point B, but then all of a sudden at point B, the present, the Past, Point A, becomes Point A(2), because thats just how it fucking works lmao this is the shit we all have observed im merely understanding as much as i can

[@JamJellyFishJam]

@@badreality2 tl;dr my other post, pretty much