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Entanglement, - key to the 'arrow of time' question?
At the quantum level:
Past - entangled particles.
Future - no entanglements.
Does this somehow anchor us in, or create a preferred frame for, 'the present'?
Any thoughts?
2 Answers
- who WAS #1?Lv 79 years agoFavorite Answer
The "quantum" level is as far as science can detect at this time, so far.
Obviously all that energy comes from somewhere science can not yet detect.
At the quantum level, there is no time or space, just a vast undulating sea of potential.
Look at it and you collapse the wave function, getting the 'reality' you expect to find.
Welcome to The Matrix! ;)
http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=3VFDIKgm_QI
I'm taking the red pill, except it has never been offered.
Time is not that complicated. Kabbalah teaches that this physical universe is all happening inside the mind of The Creator. It's a holographic 'reality'. We humans who live here in the field of time have to think linearly and wait for the movie to be over before we know what the ending will be. We're stuck with time until after our dying breath.
Quantum entanglement is just a piece of evidence that time, being necessary for the laws of physics, does not apply at every level.
Buddhists, especially Zen, say the present moment, the present instant, is all that's real. That's where life happens. So long as we inhabit these animal bodies and fusion happens in the sun(s) we are stuck with time and there is no escape until you breathe your last breath. Then reality changes as you enter the next level of the game.
Humans are prisoners of our 5 or 6 senses in our monkey bodies. We are not equipped to handle the quantum level.
As for time, I'll tell you a story I heard from Alan Watts.
http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Alan_Watts
NPR used to play his lectures.
It is a Hindu story.
Once a man was somehow privileged to ask (God) a question.
http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Brahma
The question he asked was "how did you make all this?"
Brahma grasped him by the hair and thrust him into a pool of water.
Instantly he was a young girl. She grew up and married The Prince who eventually became King. They had several children. Then barbarians sacked the Kingdom, all her family was killed and she was crying, sitting on the curb in the smoke.
Brahman lifted the man out of the pool by his hair and asked "for whom were you weeping?"
Source(s): You may be interested in this unified field theory. http://www.fhu.com/books/finding_god/ It is not religious, per se, but claims that spiritual energy precedes what we can detect. Also claims gravity is not a pull but a push. If he's right, that gravity really is an electro/magnetic phenom, there's infinite free electricity everywhere and Starship Enterprise is possible. Unfortunately not in my lifetime, and it will cost $1Trillion to build each one. Darn! All we have to do is build the magic box or antenna. That's the trick, isn't it? "Dammit Jim! I'm a handyman, not a doctor!" ;) - oldprofLv 79 years ago
You may have something.
There is a variant of the split slit experiment where it can be shown that photons will drop their wave functions in anticipation of being detected in the future. [See source.] And that smacks of a signal being sent from the future into that future's past (now?). And we all know (uh huh) that time travel into the past is impossible. Yet....
Like you apparently have done, I've guessed that quantum entanglement may be the clue as to how those photons can collapse their wave functions and become located points...before they are actually detected. The faster than light aspect of entangled quanta, to my way of thinking, speaks to me that the rate of time may move along more than just the one dimension we know about. And if the signal between the two quanta travels along that time line, that may circumvent any light limits and, ta da, allow time flow backward to the normal flow.
OK, so it's a SWAG; but then a few centuries ago a spherical Earth was a SWAG as well.
Source(s): "The Fabric of the Cosmos" by Brian Greene.