A Growing Number of Scientists Are Convinced the Future Influences the Past

https://www.vice.com/en/article/epvgjm/a-growing-number-of-scientists-are-convinced-the-future-influences-the-past

Have you ever found yourself in a self-imposed jam and thought, “Well, if it isn’t the consequences of my own actions”? It’s a common refrain that exposes a deeper truth about the way we humans understand time and causality. Our actions in the past are correlated to our experience of the future, whether that’s a good outcome, like acing a test because you prepared, or a bad one, like waking up with a killer hangover.

But what if this forward causality could somehow be reversed in time, allowing actions in the future to influence outcomes in the past? This mind-bending idea, known as retrocausality, may seem like science fiction grist at first glance, but it is starting to gain real traction among physicists and philosophers, among other researchers, as a possible solution to some of the most intractable riddles underlying our reality.

In other words, people are becoming increasingly “retro-curious,” said Kenneth Wharton, a professor of physics at San Jose State University who has published research about retrocausality, in a call with Motherboard. Even though it may feel verboten to consider a future that affects the past, Wharton and others think it could account for some of the strange phenomena observed in quantum physics, which exists on the tiny scale of atoms.

“We have instincts about all sorts of things, and some are stronger than others,” said Wharton, who recently co-authored an article about retrocausality with Huw Price, a distinguished professor emeritus at the University of Bonn and an emeritus fellow of Trinity College, Cambridge.

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