From end notes of my book Destiny Matrix 2010 2nd Edition - under construction
Astrophysics and Relativity
On Jul 23, 2010, at 11:03 AM, Nick Herbert wrote:
“The notion that knowledge of a future boundary condition could eliminate quantum uncertainty was first put forth by I.J. Good (1916-2009) in "The Scientist Speculates-- an Anthology of Partially-Baked Ideas" published in 1964. As far as I am aware Good has priority in this speculation. …”
For the record, I was not consciously influenced by I.J. Good's book about that idea.
I think Saul-Paul showed me that book when I got to San Francisco? Saul-Paul had already cited me in his Berkeley Opera on that idea when I was with Abdus Salam in Trieste before I met Saul-Paul. Actually Feynman has the germ of the idea in his Lagrangian QM fairly explicit in his NR QM paper. I do remember being influenced by Fred Hoyle who is clear about it in his book Intelligent Universe. Also remember Greg Benford's sci-fi novel Timescape - I was collaborating with Greg informally on some of this back at UCSD - part of the gang with Herbie Bernstein, Harry Yesian he fictionalizes in the novel. Of course Hoyle came to La Jolla frequently back then to see the Burbidges and the beaches. Fred Wolf wrote Star Wave in early 80's I think influenced by Feynman's papers. I don't recall Fred even knowing about I.J. Good's book, but maybe I am mistaken?
It's not obvious reading Aharonov's and Vaidman's papers that they literally mean a real physical retro-causality on the intermediate measurement by post-selection, which operationally seems to be merely a way of doing the after-the-fact statistical analysis (throwing away - tracing over) final states one is not interested in - similar to how the Bell's theorem-violating correlations are extracted from the raw data. Basically post-selection is temporal EPR correlation rather than spatial.
My early ideas on future to past are already recorded in the 1973 SRI tape of my first meeting with Hal Puthoff and Russell Targ arranged by Brendan O Regan during their CIA remote viewing experiments with Uri Geller, Pat Price, Ingo Swann et-al - my idea was implanted in my 1953 "contact" whatever that really was. I never read the Sciama article cited below until Saul-Paul sent it on July 24, 2010. Of course, if we believe in signal nonlocality then my getting the ideas years ago could be the past effect of the future cause of me reading Saul-Paul’s message.
On Jul 24, 2010, at 9:47 AM, Saul-Paul Sirag wrote:
Nick & Jack,
Nick is referring to I.J. Good's short article "Two-way Determinism" on pp. 314-315 of "The Scientist Speculates" (Basic Books, 1962). Here it is:
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'Backward time isn't such a new thing, backward time will start long ago.' --Doog (after a popular song).
G.N. Lewis* outlined a theory of light in which the present is determined as much by the future as the past. Popper,** contradicting a familiar interpretation of Heisenberg's uncertainty principle, claimed that the position and momentum of a particle can both be determined with arbitrarily high accuracy at a single moment of time, provided one has accurately observed both its earlier position and its later momentum at two specified moments. It is natural then to raise the following question.
Given a connected bounded piece of space-time, are all the elementary subatomic events within it that are classically describable (i.e. without explicit reference to quantum mechanics) fully determined by all the classically describable events outside of it? Or, if not, is there any neat way of describing how much indeterminacy is left? Can these questions be answered in terms of existing quantum mechanics, and do they raise interesting new mathematical problems?
If the answer to the first question is yes, then we could say that we have two-way determinism, since the present would be mathematically determined jointly by the past and future, however remote. Note however that two-way determinism is a special case of what is usually called 'indeterminism', since the past alone would not determine the present. This merely shows that language does not alway behave very well.
If two-way determinism is true it raises another, more philosophical, question, namely whether we should then say that future events are contributory causes of present ones.***
* Lewis, G.N.: Nature, volume 117, pages 236-8, 1926.
** Popper, K.R.: The Logic of Scientific Discovery: page 231, 1959. See also Sir Arthur Eddington, The Nature of the Physical World, London, 1928, chapter 14.
*** Compare pbis Nos. 104 (Computers, Causality, and the Direction of Time), 45 (Speculations Concerning Precognition), and 59 (Precognition and Reversed Causality).
-------------------------------------[end of quote from I.J. Good]
BTW: I gave a copy of this book to Andrija Puharich in the spring of 1973, when I was working on a story about Uri Geller for Esquire magazine (which was never published). In that story I also mentioned the idea that we are being influenced by us in the future. (Also both Uri and Andrija had discussed this idea).
As I have mentioned before Dennis Sciama discussed "two-way determinism" in the book "Determinism and Freedom" (edited by Sidney Hook, New York University, 1958; Collier Books edition, 1961). This is also short so I (again) will type it.
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Determinsm and the Cosmos
Dennis W. Sciama, Trinity College, Cambridge
“As a physicist I have found the following working hypothesis very useful: violent controversy about a scientific problem is a sign that some simple essential consideration is missing. The polemic, as it were, tries to substitute for the missing point, but of course it never can. I think for instance that this has been so in discussions of Mach's principle of the origin of inertia, and also of the problem of deducing irreversible macroscopic behavior from reversible microscopic laws.
Bridgman has reminded us that the physicists are conducting violent controversy about the meaning of quantum mechanics. This situation is in striking contrast to that prevailing in classical mechanics; for although classical mechanics is known to be false, there is no dispute as to its meaning. It is only in quantum mechanics (which is known to be true!) that there is such a dispute….
The basic way in which quantum mechanics differs from classical mechanics is the following: our inferences about the future must be expressed in terms of probabilities. This introduction of probability would enable us to make the calculation.
With this state of affairs in mind, let us make a new assumption. Let us suppose that in nature systems are deterministic in the sense that we can calculate the state of a system at time t if we know enough boundary conditions referring to times other than t; but let us differ from classical mechanics by supposing that nature is so constructed that roughly speaking, half the boundary conditions must refer to the past and half to the future of the moment t. In other words, we assume that nature is such that "mixed" boundary conditions are always needed.
Presumably a system with such properties would be called deterministic. This is a matter of definition, of course; what is really important is that the behavior of the system is as well defined and intelligible as that of a system obeying classical mechanics. But now we must ask: How would a "mixed" system appear to an observer who himself is part of the system?
Now, such and observer, for reasons that cannot be elaborated here but that have to do with the second law of thermodynamics, is acquainted only with the past. Hence if he attempts to calculate the state of a system at a time t in his future, he will find that he cannot do so, for he does not know all the boundary conditions. His knowledge of the past boundary will delimit the possibilities considerably, but it is clear that to the observer the system will appear to contain indeterminate elements.
What sort of a theory will such an observer devise? In effect he will be forced to average over all those future boundary conditions that are compatible with his present knowledge. (Of course, at first he will not realize that this is what he is doing.) That is to say, he will be forced to introduce a probability calculus to account for his observations. The suggestion is that this probability calculus is just quantum mechanics.
In this way the correctness of quantum mechanics can be reconciled with a deterministic universe. In the language of von Newmann, there are hidden variables; they escape his ban because they refer to the future.”
---------------------------[end of quote from Dennis Sciama]
All for now;-)
Saul-Paul
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Thanks Waldyr, I will cite you on this in my book Destiny Matrix 2010 - we did not know this. Yes, I think I already have Helmut Schmidt & Henry Stapp cited in old version Destiny Matrix 2002 - thanks for reminding me of Raju who I did not know about in 2002.
On Jul 24, 2010, at 12:09 PM, Professor Waldyr A. Rodrigues Jr. UNICAMP, Brazil wrote:
“Dears Jack and Fred,
1) The famous Italian mathematician Professor Luigi Fantappié wrote a series of articles in the 50’s where he proposed explicitly influence from the future.
One of his students, Professor Giuseppe Arcidiacono ( now deceased, and which I knew personally when I have been a visiting professor at Perugia university) wrote a very interesting book called ‘’Fantappié e gli Universi’’ (Il Fuoco edditora, Roma ,1986) where Fantappié’s ideas are described in detail and where references to Fantappié’s papers can be found. Fantappié’s ideas are very similar to your ideas.
Maybe it is a good idea for Jack to order and read the book ( you will recall the Italian of your grandfathers ). If you did not succeed in buying the book, I will ask one of my students to scan it for you.”
It's a good idea. Perhaps you can write something we can include or do it in a review of the 2nd edition when it comes out - you can put it on Amazon. I am under time pressure to get this 2nd revised edition into the market. I think I cite Costa de Beauregard already along with Stalin's alleged spymaster Yakov Tereletskii whose tachyon book we had at SDSU.
“2) Also, I mention here Professor Olivier Costa de Beauregard ( a famous French physicist, now deceased). He has been my guest at UNICAMP in 1974 (!). We discuss a lot about retro causality at that time. In particular, I recall that he wrote a paper called: “Einstein-Podolski-Rosen-Paradox non-separability and Feynman non-locality, Phys. Letters A 60(2), 93-96, 1986” where he claimed that retro causality coming from QM gives to paranormal phenomena a real existence right.”
For that we need signal nonlocality violating quantum theory as Brian Josephson and I independently suggested and as Antony Valentini formalized in the Bohm interpretation. Henry Stapp already formalized it in the Copenhagen collapse interpretation for which he was figuratively burned at the stake by the same people who have attacked Brian Josephson now for decades like in Les Miserables
“At that time, when I got interested in the paranormal, I put Beauregard in contact with several extraordinary paranormal people in Brazil and he got very much impressed.
3) Of course, you cannot forget also Helmut Schmidt ( who you meet at São Paulo) and that is talking about retro causal influences since 1969. ( see: http://www.parapsych.org/members/h_schmidt.html)
4) Finally, last month I have meet in Pecs and Budapest the mathematician Professor C. K. Raju ( see his web site at: http://ckraju.net/).
He wrote some books and articles arguing for retro causation. His ideas are very similar to Fantappie´s and yours. I told him about this fact, he said that never read Fantappié or your papers. So, eventually one can conclude that those are ideas coming from a very far from future and arriving free for anyone who pay attention on it…”
Yes, Fred Hoyle suggests that explicitly.
Best regards,
Waldyr
Quotes below are excerpted from:
Astrophysics and Relativity
Preprint Series No. 70
THE UNIVERSE: PAST AND PRESENT REFLECTIONS
FRED HOYLE
May 1981
Department of
Applied Mathematics and Astronomy
"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 dS 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.”
[1] Tamara Davis’s PhD dissertation may be downloaded here http://www.physics.uq.edu.au/download/tamarad/
[1] http://web.mac.com/nquebedeau/Norman_Quebedeau/Animation_files/spectra.swf
[1] Jack Sarfatti wrote: Indeed, Nobel Prize physicist Brian Josephson was disinvited from a Bohm physics conference in Tuscany, Italy in August of 2010 by Antony Valentini because of Brian’s research into the same kinds of paranormal experiences recorded in this memoir. Not even a Nobel Prize, a professorship at Cambridge University’s Trinity College, a membership in Newton’s Royal Society, not even invitations by The Queen to Buckingham Palace could prevent the Orwellian New Inquisitors from this blatant shocking assault on freedom. Another case of the resurgence of totalitarian repression of politically incorrect ideas reminiscent of the Gulag in the Soviet Union is the ban from Britain of American talk radio host Michael Savage by both the Labor and the new Conservative governments treading on the Magna Carta. Some old-fashioned liberal once wrote “I may not agree with your ideas, but I will defend your right to speak them.” I am writing this in the midst of climate changes, man-made or not does not matter, the BP oil spill in the Gulf of Mexico, in the wake of the Iceland volcano eruption that stopped air travel to Britain and Northern Europe and in the aftermath of the world financial collapse of September 2008 allegedly brought on by string theorist physicists inventing “derivatives” on Wall Street prostituting themselves to greedy gangsters in pinstripe suits. It sure looks like what Sir Martin Rees, British Astronomer Royal, Master of Josephson’s Trinity College and Newton’s Royal Society has called “Our Final Hour.”
to be continued