: Just one thing here: did either of you (SD, Forrest) here
: about the recent experiment which proved DeBroglie's
: theory that massive particles are also waves? They
: used a single electron and lasers instead of slits but
: they were able to get the electron to interfere with
: itself! In your face, Einstein! Quantum theory rocks!
I'm not sure which experiment you're talking about. I know they've developed so-called "atom lasers;" the name is misleading but they do allow self-interference of entire atoms--four orders of magnitude heavier than electrons. It's all waves, baby.
: Ok, sorry. As to free will and determinism: Time travel
: raises the apparent paradox of changing your own past,
: but it's my theory that this is not a paradox at all
: and does not require loops of any kind. We see it as
: problematic because we're used to thinking of material
: objects as being stuck in the spacetime we
: perceive--unable to move through time, unable to exist
: in two place at once, etc. However, if you could step
: outside of time and look at it as just another
: dimension of space, you would see that this is like
: saying water can only run downhill--which is true
: except that sometimes water is carried uphill by an
: outside agency.
: So, if you travel back in time and change your past, all
: you're doing is fulfilling something that has already
: happened. There was never a time-line when you DIDN'T
: exist at that past moment. It's the way the universe
: was set up from the beginning. There is no change, and
: therefore no loop. Wow, I hope that makes sense. The
: time machine doesn't break the time-line; it's part of
: the time-line.
You're just affirming the existence of causal loops, right? We call them "loops" because our mathematical prediction methods work best, in those cases, by inputting a future event and predicting a past one. I guess you mean that we could in principle calculate (ignoring quantum chaos) from the state of the Earth right now that, in twenty minutes, a woman claiming to be from the year 2032 will appear in a flash of light in Times Square, and also that, in thirty-two years, a very similar woman will disappear in a flash of light from her time research lab. The direction of causality is just a matter of taste.
: I'm actually collaborating on a novel about this very
: subject right now. A bunch of people turn themselves
: into antimatter so they can go into the past (in your
: face, P.A.M. Dirac! Thank you, Dr. Feynman!). When
: they arrive they find an entire civilization of time
: travellers who have developed a society based on
: perfect predestination--every person has a laptop that
: tells them what they're going to eat for breakfast,
: who they're going to marry, when and how they're going
: to die. The book is really about how this would change
: the human race in truly profound ways--these people
: are aware of the entire time-line, not just their
: limited perception of it, and therefore every last one
: of them is like that theorized alcoholic regarding
: every single "decision" they make in their
: lives--they know that their past will determine
: (utterly) their present actions and that their present
: actions will determine (utterly) the future and as a
: result they have no need for free will.
A question--what do you mean by "turn into antimatter?" The standard Feynman-inspired method of "making a U-turn in time"
would be to find a chunk of antimatter of the same mass and charge as you and walk into it, annihilating yourself. From Feynman's perspective (as you of course know), you'd actually be reflected back through time *as* that chunk of antimatter. The obvious problem with this, though, is that the chunk doesn't look anything like you in shape or composition, which means that as soon as you started moving back in time your atoms got all scrambled. Even if you make a chunk which looks just like an "anti-you" and then walk into it, your backwards life will end as soon as you get back to the moment of the "anti-you"'s assembly. How do you get around this?
Also, is this a world where quantum indeterminacy doesn't hold?
: Anyway, that's my take.
: My favorite quote on the subject: Saul Bellow, when asked
: if he believed in fate, said, "You have to have
: free will. You have no choice in the matter."
Uggh...paradox...head...hurting...can barely...type signature...
--Silicon...Dream...
