Quotes by Fred Hoyle

"Many will smile if I say that such an incident was triggered by the deciphering of a cosmic signal. It will be agreed that a sudden reordering of substantial blocks of information in the brain must have been involved, but it will be said that the initiating signal happened by chance, from a random firing of neurons. ...
The alternate view is that the deaf Beethoven, decisively cut-off from the distractions of the world of men, equipped as a terminal with unusual backing storage, was able to receive a particular component of the cosmic signals, and with sharply increasing clarity as the years passed by. This view would be my choice, but each of us must listen and decide. Perhaps the decision turns on whether we ourselves hear the thunder of Zeus on Mt. Olympus."


Hoyle died in 2001 before the meaning of dark energy was understood.

dark energy density ~ (area/entropy of our future horizon hologram)^-1

"The time was the late 1960?s, when Narlikar and I were struggling with the problem of the quantum mechanical signal from the future."

Fred Alan Wolf and I were doing the same thing at San Diego State at same time.

"Let me begin with the 1964-70 period. It was then that I became a dyed-in-the-wool believer in the time symmetry of basic physics. Of course there are aspects of our experience that are not time symmetric - thermodynamics, the past-to-future propagation of radiation fields, and certain features of particle physics. In my view such asymmetries are cosmological manifestations, however, not basic physics. Here I have space only to discuss the past-to-future propagation of the electromagnetic field. In a famous demonstration, Wheeler and Feynman showed more than thirty years ago that one could have a time-symmetric electrodynamics augmented by a cosmological response from the future that reproduced exactly the same results as the classical Maxwell-Lorentz theory. For some years it was thought that a similar demonstration could not be given in quantum physics, but in the late 1960?s Jayant Narlikar and I showed that, just as in the classical case of Wheeler and Feynman, it was possible to have a time-symmetric local quantum theory augmented by a cosmological response from the future that reproduced exactly all the practical results of normal quantum electrodynamics. Although there was no difference at all in its statistical predictions, the time-symmetric theory was interestingly different in its details. Because the cosmological response involved both the wavefunction and its conjugate complex, unlike normal quantum mechanics no pure-amplitude theory could be formulated. This I saw as an advantage. The pure-amplitude aspect of normal quantum mechanics involves a redundancy, because information is discarded in passing to practical results. The time-symmetric theory yields the practical results without redundancy.
... What I saw in 1970 or thereabouts was that von Neumann had been concerned with a finite local system. If cosmology were involved, with a response from the future, the dynamical variables in the system could be infinite, and the situation could then be different. This was the chink of light.

Even so, the problem remained acutely puzzling. The future imposes a condition on a local system because a signal goes out from the local system to other material systems in the future, which respond with a return signal on account of the time symmetry. One would like a situation in which the return signal imposed a deterministic reality on the local system, forcing an explicit decision to be made in all situations of an A or not-A kind, as in the example discussed above (mushroom cloud or no-mushroom cloud). The trouble is that so long as one calculates the return signal from within quantum mechanics this does not happen, just as von Neumann claimed it could not happen. One is faced by a chicken-and-egg situation. The initial local system does not have deterministic reality because the systems in its future with which it interacts do not have deterministic reality, and this is because the systems in the further future with which the second systems interact do not have deterministic reality, and so on along an infinite chain of interactions. Yet somewhere the Gordian knot has to be cut - it must be, since our everyday experience tells us that it is! The mathematical loophole lies at the limit-of the infinite chain of interactions. True, we cannot establish deterministic reality by starting within the chain and by attempting to argue in a past-to-future direction towards the limit. But if we were to start with deterministic reality at the limit, arguing backwards from future to past, there would be deterministic reality at every link of the chain. In other words, the trouble may well come from arguing the problem back-to-front instead of front-to-back."




Obviously the buck stops at our future dark energy de Sitter event horizon that cuts the Gordian knot. Note Hoyle came to UCSD when I was there in the late 60's before he really had this idea matured - did I.J. Good get it from Hoyle or the other way round. Obviously, they knew each other.

"This was the stage of my thinking following the work of the 1964-70 period, before it became apparent, from the arguments given earlier, than an enormous intelligence must be abroad in the Universe. As the Americans say, this instantly creates a new ball game. ...the persistent religious conviction that the pattern of our lives is stored in the future looks as if it could quite well be correct."

That's the future hologram right there!

"At the mathematical limit discussed above. At the last trumpet! What an extraordinary way to describe the outcome of a sequence of arguments involving the condensation of the wavefunction, the need to avoid von Neumann?s mathematical result for finite systems, and time-symmetric electrodynamics. Of course one can argue that the correspondences are fortuitous. Notice, however, that in timesymmetric theory influences are indeed felt “in (less than) a moment, in (even less than) the twinkling of an eye”, and that all finite events are brought together at the mathematical limit in the future. Fortuitous or not, it is curious that so many people without scientific knowledge have believed in the idea, as if they had caught a glimpse of a difficult message which they could only express in terms of an everyday analogy.  Religion is an interesting but not really convincing example of the computer terminal idea."