2021: Creating a Lexicon of Future

R is for Retrocausality

Retrocausality, or backwards causation, is a concept of cause and effect in which an effect precedes its cause in time and so a later event affects an earlier one. In quantum physics, the distinction between cause and effect is not made at the most fundamental level and so time-symmetric systems can be viewed as causal or retrocausal.

Philosophical considerations of time travel often address the same issues as retrocausality, as do treatments of the subject in fiction, but the two phenomena are distinct. ~ Wikipedia

Recent mind experiments by theoretical physicists Caslav Brukner and Vlatko Vedral demonstrated, with mathematics logic, that temporal entanglement phenomena are possible: the act of measuring the polarization of a photon at a given instant of time may affect it was polarized the moment before!

If we accept the assumption that all particles in the universe are mutually connected (in particular particles of matter and energy), then an instantaneous interaction of “here-now-present” with “there-then-past” particles is absolutely possible. This would not only disturb but even modify objects’ structure.

The simple action of observing an astronomical object which is far away both in space and in time could therefore influence quantum events in the past, to the extent of causing the so called “retrocausality”.

If all this were true, we ourselves, as observers, could cause a “retrocausality” thus modifying a continuously changeable past. ~ Retrocausality