A Time Machine:John Archibald Wheeler, and Delayed Choice

 

How is it possible to change an event after the event happens? At the quantum level, that is what can occur. Time is not linear but somehow jumbled. (Does this have philosophic implications for the study of free will? That is, events can be changed at the micro level.)

If you aren't confused by quantum physics, you really haven't understood it. (Neils Bohr)

In a sense, time machines already exist. In quantum theory, actions in the present could change the past, or at least determine it.

Déjà Vu and Physicist Julian Barbour

Déjà Vu and Physicist Julian Barbour

An old woman sits in her wheel chair in a nursing home, a photo album on her lap. She shows another old lady pictures of herself with her first beau on the village green, of herself in bridal gown, of her child sitting on her knee. She looks up at the bare walls, and sees somewhere herself at sixteen, turning many heads, her father carefully screening suitors at the door. It all happened so fast, first that and now this. She opens the album to a new page to show her husband in the year before he died, proudly washing their new Ford in the driveway.

Consume my heart away, sick with desire and fastened to a dying animal. (W.B. Yeats)

In Julian Barbour's world, every first date, every kiss, every senior prom, every marriage, every departing is repeated precisely and endlessly. Every hot dog at a baseball game will be eaten again and again. A teenager's coolness lasts forever.

Notes on Time and Choice: Daniel Dennett, Benjamin Libet, Roger Penrose, John Wheeler, and Advaita

Notes on Time and Choice: Daniel Dennett, Benjamin Libet, Roger Penrose, John Wheeler, and Advaita

Everything humanity thinks and believes about itself is predicated upon two concepts. One is free will; the other is self. Look wherever you will, whatever society you find, and all cultures contain a belief in some kind of will, and self. Civilizations, economies, legal systems, art, religion, all arise from them. But what if they are illusory? Pedro Calderón de la Barca (1600-1681) said that life is a dream. Nobody wants to believe that; such belief seems to threaten entire human edifices, our history and struggle to arrive at these Twenty First Century shores.

Still, both concepts are based more on belief than on indisputable evidence. They are similar to St. Augustine's description of time, of which he said, " When you don't ask, I know; when you ask, I know not."

Home______Julian Barbour & The End of Time

Here is an excerpt from the Science & Spirit interview with Julian Barbour. A link to the magazine is at the bottom.

Is time an illusion, a piece of quantum trickery that fools us into a false sensation of flow in the midst of a static reality?

Julian Barbour is an independent theoretical physicist, who lives and works just outside Oxford, England. In his ground-breaking new book, The End of Time, Barbour argues that while the laws of physics create the powerful illusion that the flow of time is real, there is increasingly strong evidence that the universe is in fact timeless.

Home_____Brain in A Vat, Time, and Peter Lynds, College Drop Out

Brain in a vat. Assume that a brain could live in a vat of chemicals and, wired by external electrodes, it would have all the normal experiences: childhood, sex, falling in love, parenting, even skiing, or sky diving. It imagines itself a person capable of a full range of activity. It has beliefs: it is a person with a name, say, Harvey Smedlap; it has a family; it enjoys food; it has orgasms; a god created it and protects it. It regards all this evidence as reliable.

Now, a question: how can one differentiate his own beliefs from that of the brain in the vat? How can one say that his evidence is more reliable than that of the brain?