This probably is not a new idea to a lot of you here, but it is new to me, since I haven’t studied much, if anything, about quantum physics. I heard today, that quantum physics has a theory that time doesn’t really exist at all; it’s just a human construct. Well, of course it’s a human construct… at least, the measurement of time, and the structuring of life around it is.
Anyway, let’s assume the theory is correct, that time doesn’t exist, and that everything is more or less happening simultaneously (it would have to, if there were no past or future, right?). Could quantum physics eventually lead to the ability to predict the “future”? Or rather, events that we would perceive as happening days, months, or years from now?
Could this explain other phenomena such as déjà vu? Or am I way off base. I probably am, I’m rather ignorant of the subject matter, but it intrigues me.
Measuring time is counting repeated events, like the repeated movement of the earth or the repeated deformation of a quartz crystal. The repeated events are no human constructs. Only the counting is. We need to count in order to measure. Our physics cannot describe what cannot be measured.
Perhaps a world without time exists. But if it exists, it can’t be measured, so our physics can’t describe it.
Isn’t the whole idea of physics that you are able to predict the future? E.g., If I throw a ball with such and such force in a given gravitational field, ignoring friction and rotation, it should follow an arc described by a parabola. I then throw ball, it falls like a parabola, BAM! I predicted the future.
In quantum mechanics you can only predict probability. The fact that time doesn’t exist, and information is stored holographically on the ‘skin’ of our Universe is a different issue. The OP is conflating far too many quarter-understood concepts and vague recollections.
I heard that when the universe reaches thermodynamic equilibrium, there will be no more events by which to time could be measured. I don’t know if this is true, but it’s crazy to think about.
Anyways: I’ve discussed some of the actual implications to quantum mechanics and relativity in this thread, starting at post 13. If you want to discuss QM, you might want to ground it in some reading first.
Surely it is relativity theory, not QM, that, on some interpretations, makes time (or, at least, the notion of time as moving steadily forward) a “human construction”. Time becomes a fourth dimension equivalent (sort of) to the three spatial dimensions.
QM, by contrast, with the uncertainty principle, actually makes the future markedly less predictable than it seemed to be under classical physics. It used to be thought, in the era of classical physics, that if you had complete and perfect knowledge of the current state of the universe you could (in principle, with unlimited computational power) predict the future. However, QM put paid to that idea. (And it was later discovered that chaos theory puts paid to it anyway, even without QM.)
Calm down-I was refraining from making a bad joke about you thinking it was interesting to think about, then saying it was crazy to think about, which means that if you were thinking about it then you must be…
Quantum physics doesn’t really have to do with time as a construct - regular physics has that covered. And regular physics makes predictions all the time, it’s just that you need an incredibly detailed measurement of the current state of things coupled with huge computational resources to make useful predictions far into the future, especially for dynamic / chaotic systems such as weather / human behavior.
But to take advantage of the notion of time as a construct to predict things, we would need a way to travel outside of our current space-time framework to view it externally, and we don’t currently have a way to do that.
On top of that, some interpretations of quantum physics imply that all possible universes exist simultaneously, and there is no one set “future” so if you escaped space time you would just see a huge wormy space-time tree of potentiality, and picking a particular branch would be more like choosing a future than predicting it.
Some people ascribe déjà vu to quantum woo, but current neuroscience theory suggests it has to do with memory writing lag.
Actually that might not be true; a space-time crystal could in theory continue to mark the passage of time forever even after the heat death of the universe.
My apologies Czarcasm and to the rules, that ‘fuck you’ was meant to be colloquial.
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Actually that might not be true; a space-time crystal could in theory continue to mark the passage of time forever even after the heat death of the universe.
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The idea was proposed by Frank Wilczek in 2012. In order for this to work it would need to have frictionless perpetual motion.
In order to predict what will happen 5 minutes from now, one must be able to predict every event, every where, that will happen between now and that 5 minutes from now.
The state of existance, 5 minutes from now will be the sum total of all the states of existance prior to 5 minutes from now.
To get back to the OP, I’m going to say the answer is no. The future is even less predictable at the level of quantum physics than it is at the level we’re more used to.
Way down at the quantum physics level, things happen at random. There’s no longer a definite connection between cause and effect. So even if you had absolute knowledge of everything in the present, you couldn’t predict the next thing that was going to happen.
It’s only at higher levels that these random events average out and patterns emerge that we can follow.
