Arizona State University
Co-Investigators
Yakir Aharonov, George Mason University
Jeff Tollaksen, George Mason University
Project Title
Cosmological and Astrophysical Implications of Quantum Post-Selection
Project Summary
This project focuses on new aspects of quantum mechanics (QM), the weird theory that governs the micro-world of atoms. The key development is that QM has no in-built directionality in time: it works just as well from past-to-future as from future-to-past. QM seemingly cannot be used to send information back-in-time, but it does link future-to-past in subtle and significant ways, due to uncertainty and indeterminism. Contrary to everyday assumptions about reality, there is no unique historical sequence of events leading up to the present state, but rather an amalgam, or superposition, of contending realities. When an observation is made, it may select out a subset of histories from the superposition. The same observation will also serve to partly determine future states of the universe. This has implications for the passage-of-time, perhaps the most fundamental of all human experiences. In physics, time does not pass, it simply is. There are temporal durations, but no flux of. Again, the reformulation of QM provides a very different picture of the nature of time, suggesting that a reconciliation of subjective temporal passage and the static, or block time, of orthodox physics might lie with the linkage between future and past states.
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