Quote (FullArcFG @ Jun 6 2012 11:54am)
The aspect here being Demonstrated is that Time is an illusion, however persistant. This is not a new concept, but it is interesting to see a "Real-world demonstration of a thought experiment". Previously the conclusion was that the future event (i.e. to measure or not to measure), influenced past States (i.e.rate of decay of a particle). The big differnce to this from the Delayed choice Quantum Eraser, is that it can be observed in interactive time, like over a period of hours, rather than Nano-second measurements.
Cool Stuff
I love thinking about shit like this.
But I still have a problem the explanation of future to past. As I recall, the illusion of time perspective denies past and present in favor of 'different states of now'.
After reading through the experiment procedure, the 'future into past' simplication sounds like an analogy to explain the results of the math to the public. In technical terms, one could say the relations implied by quantum entanglement are independent of temporal order. Instead of saying the information of the future affects the past, it would also be more intuitive to say "they both agreed on the result in advance."
From the lab write up (which is very concise and very well written I must say):
Quote
However, there is never a paradox if the quantum state is viewed as to be no more than a “catalogue of our knowledge." Then the state is a probability list for all possible measurement outcomes, the relative temporal order of the three observer’s events is irrelevant and no physical interactions whatsoever between these events, especially into the past, are necessary to explain the delayed-choice entanglement swapping. What, however, is important is to relate the lists of Alice, Bob and Victor’s measurement results. On the basis of Victor’s measurement settings and results, Alice and Bob can group their earlier and locally totally random results into subsets which each have a different meaning and interpretation. This formation of subsets is independent of the temporal order of the measurements. According to Wheeler, Bohr said: “No elementary phenomenon is a phenomenon until it is a registered phenomenon.”
We would like to extend this by saying: “Some registered phenomena do not have a meaning unless they are
put in relationship with other registered phenomena.”
Thanks for bringing this to my attention, OP
This post was edited by EndlessSky on Jun 6 2012 05:51pm