AAAS 92nd Annual Meeting to Hold Symposium on "Quantum Retrocausation: Theory and Experiment"

Dear Jack,

Happy New Year!  I hope this note finds you well.

I'd like to invite you to participate in the upcoming symposium, "Quantum Retrocausation: Theory and Experiment," to be held at the 92nd Annual Meeting of the Pacific Division of the AAAS at University of San Diego, June 12-16, 2011.  Our two-day meeting, described below, will run Monday and Tuesday, June 13-14.

This symposium follows an earlier one at USD, "Frontiers of Time: Retrocausation -- Experiment and Theory," held at the 87th Annual Meeting of the AAAS Pacific Division, the proceedings of which were published as an AIP Conference Proceedings (Vol. 863) in 2006.

Please let me know if you'd like to attend what promises to be a lively and timely gathering.  If you have any questions, please feel free to contact me.

Hope to see you in San Diego in June.

With Best Regards,
Daniel P. Sheehan

Department of Physics
University of San Diego
5998 Alcala Park
San Diego, CA 92110
619-260-4095
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Quantum Retrocausation: Theory and Experiment

Causation -- the notion that earlier events affect later ones but not vice versa -- undergirds our experience of reality and physical law. Although it predicated on the forward unidirectionality of time, in fact, most physical laws are time symmetric; that is, they formally and equally admit both time-forward and time-reverse solutions.  Time-reverse solutions would allow the future to influence the past, i.e., reverse (or retro-) causation.  Why time-forward solutions are preferentially observed in nature remains an unresolved problem in physics.

Laboratory evidence for reverse causation is intriguing but scarce; meanwhile, theoretical models for these results have not yet made deep enough connections with mainstream physics.  Even the most basic physical constraints -- e.g., whether reverse causation is best explained by energy transfers or simply by correlations without information exchange -- remain open questions.

This symposium will explore recent experiments, theory, and philosophical issues connected with retrocausation.  In particular, it is hoped that this meeting will help generate comprehensive theoretical models by which experimental results can be understood, and stimulate new experiments and collaborations by which the underlying physics may be more clearly exposed.