Why Physicists Think The Future Changes the Past - Retrocausality Explained

I clicked on this video because I am fascinated by theories about reality and because I had a very odd experience surrounding the death of my mom in 2007. She had a heart attack and was taken to the hospital for immediate surgery. I stayed at the hospital through the seven hour surgery and visited her in recovery after until she suggested that I get some rest. Her surgery went well, she was recovering and everything seemed normal, even by the analysis of the doctors. As I started to walk out of the room, I was gripped by an irrational feeling that I would never see her again. She assured me that I would and I convinced myself to go back to our apartment. I decided to lay in her bed for comfort. I fell asleep but was awakened in a cold sweat by a crippling panic. I knew something was wrong with her. I frantically began searching for the card with the information to call her. My phone rang within a minute or two. It was one of the doctors telling me to get to the hospital immediately. She was having an episode and they were trying to resuscitate her. They failed and she passed. I don't remember ever having a panic attack before that day and I had no reason to believe that anything was wrong. It was like I knew she was going to die before she did.

I believe a better explaination is that both particles are the same higher dimensional particle being expressed in two spacial localities at the same time where each representation is a mirror of the other in space. When one changes it's quantum state, the whole higher dimension particle changes it's quantum state therefore representing the change in both spatial localities at the same time.

My favorite thing about the universe that I've learned thus far is that so much is determined by our very own observation. It's almost like reality itself was made for consciousness to exist.

I was recently in a situation I like to call Shrodinger's Freezer. The power went out and my wife was worried about the food in the freezer going bad and wanted to check on it. I brought up that before opening the freezer we don't know if it's good or bad, but if we open the freezer before the power came back on then it would go bad before we had a chance to cook it, so the only reason to open the freezer would be not to check if it was good or not but only to throw all of the food away. Luckily, she left it closed until the power came back and most of the food was still good.

This was perhaps the first time I actually understood any of this. Very well explained

Interesting thanks. Adds another layer to the things I know I don't understand.

It's interesting how to me, coming from a comp sci background, none of the three ideas are as discomforting as they probably ought to be. To us, it's just delayed evaluation, and ideally, the trigger for the evaluation is handled by the runtime in an optimal way and is totally invisible to you. More than anything it's probably an indication of how detached from reality computers can make us feel.

That explanation of how info and cause can only travel at the max speed of light helped me truly quantify the concepts of time being relative to space

When science is so advanced, it is magic

I really like the way that this video condenses the complex ideas of quantum mechanics into an ideal form that feels mentally digestible. It's just enough to make you think without overwhelming the viewer with too much of the reality behind it, so to speak. Keeping with the high level explanation, I'm curious how retrocausality affects the function of a quantum computer. If retrocausality is the explanation, and the block universe is what we are experiencing, then by attempting to communicate information across a vast distance by changing the state of one particle to excite the change in another can't really happen, right? By changing the state of an observed particle, you would then be altering the original local correlation between the two particles so that the information was always what you wanted to convey from the very beginning. I suppose for a human moving through time relative to the observed instant, the state of the information changed as they expected it to, in the present. Big picture, if the past could be changed, we would never know it, because we would experience the causal result as if it were always the truth regardless. So retrocausality doesn't really change the way we are doing things, because they will behave the same they always have from our point of view. They always were, even when that past state is altered.

What if both photons are actually one and the same 4D object? This is actually similar to retro causality, since its again just a single photon visible at two different locations by going through a 4th dimension. You just can't know, if it's actually time or if there is another 4th dimension

It’s interesting to see very similar debates happening with physicists communities that have happened with many theologians. Questions of determinism specifically in this case.

I'm new too the retrocausality concept but I will say it's definitely what happens when are sleeping and hear a sudden noise that potentially wakes you up. The noise, although unexpected, fits perfectly in your dream....

I came across a solution to this problem on a physics youtube channel a while back (forgive me, I forgot where it was or to whom it had been accredited). The solution was thus: Every time a quantum wave function collapses, the universe is narrowed down. Basically, if a wave function represents all potential possibilities of a quantum decision, then an observation chooses one of those possibilities and puts the observer "in phase" with this possibility. The natural consequence of this is that the observer's portion of the universe that it is "in phase" with will decrease over time, which also explains entropy increasing over time (loss of apparent information). This hypothesis is appealing because it does not require retro-causality nor instantaneous particle action; the apparent instantaneous action is simply a result of narrowing the probability field embedded in the universe the observer is in phase with.

I experience mind blowing synchronistic events on a fairly regular basis. This has led me to investigate Time and "What is consciousness" .. and most importantly: "Who are we" Some synchronistic events have enabled me to vaguely predict future events in a way that is difficult to write of as coincidence due to the recurring nature of these events . Is synchronicity a clue to understanding time and the universe. Is matter an extension of our consciousness? I think it could be. Are we only just barely aware of our potential, are we just in the chrysalis stages of our evolution? Who are we?

So delighted to have discovered this channel! Thank you Dr. Ben!

I don't believe that wibbly wobbly, timey wimey stuff.

You're a good teacher, I never heard anyone explain entanglement so short and precisely. To keep the interest of non physicists it must be explainedso we can follow, you managed to keep it easily digestible.

Time happens all at once, and our brains sort through it!

You've got a really impressive style in the way you describe things. Thanksa a lot!