my guess

Post Reply New Topic

i'm not a scientist, just an enthusiast.

how can causation go backward in time?

my best guess it that time is less like a "thing" than like a perception. i think our brains can only perceive a limited part of a spectrum of time (as with sound and light), but this limitation isn't the same for subatomic particles, or not all of them. thus they can interact with more of the time spectrum.

to us it looks impossible, because until recently, we not only couldn't perceive the "backward" part of time, we also couldn't percieve anything that interacted with it. now we have the means to begin to see things that *do* interact with it.

and of course, it seems impossible...

i hope i live long enough to see if my guess is close

No one has ever observed an effect preceding a cause. If it is possible then it takes place under conditions which we have never encountered. Like inside a black hole; but that does not help us since no signal or information can ever get out of a black hole.

There is no apriori logical reason what an effect cannot preceed a cause but it has never been observed.

ruveyn

I remember reading about one particular case where the effect preceded the cause. The details are somewhat hazy as it was many years ago when I was a physics student. There is a particular reaction between subatomic / fundamental particles where this actually occurs. I think it was some sort of two step interaction. I wish I could remember more so I could do a search and find the details. It worked in a sort of self fulfilling loop - so there is no possibility of interrupting the process. In other words like the often quoted paradox of going back in time and killing one's grandfather. This sort of paradox can't happen in this particular decay mechanism.

It was something along the lines of A interacts with B creating C and D. C interacts with E creating A and F (But the output particle A is actually the input particle A). I've forgotten the specific particles involved. Anyone else come across this and can remember the specific reaction? The principle of cause then effect went out of the window in this particular reaction.

just starting my internet hunt, but ran across this (old but i assume still valid):



Web reading: If you want to find recent research articles on time travel or wormholes, have a look at http://www-spires.slac.stanford.edu/find/hep and search with commands like ''find title wormhole'' or ''find title time machine.''