Below is what I have to offer having read some of your post titled: History, Economics, and Time Reversal

Time, no matter how simply or abstractly is used as a gauge for summing up the multiple layered realities – symbolic or physical – of humanity, ultimately throws another curve ball in. Translated existence of humans, with the passage of time ( being a measure, a unit of analysis for their actions, words, thoughts and feelings lead to the conclusion that the instantaneousness of some physical laws, ironically, superimpose a sense of immortality, at least on the behaviors and their consequences as exerted by able living bodies called human beings.

All the rationalities of customs, values, conscientious emotions about right and wrong, sadly become secondary or even unimportant due to the rush of here and now, the perceived necessity of fitting in the moment, lest losing the opportunities to be, whatever that might mean for anyone and that differs for everyone, subjectively and even objectively, at times. The universality of human experiences in terms of time as a quantifier of their lives lived, well lived or poorly lived carve an imposition of sorts if you will, of morbid, dismal and bleak future or agreeable and content future. The continuum of time, in and of itself for everyone, is such a lengthy span of being, that condensing life to all proper affairs and behaviors, harmless and safe memories, in the physical realities of life and living, the times in which it is lived or being lived, may not be possible for all people.

The issue seems to be, as one perspective, one which demands an answer to this query: how to bring the paradigm of timeliness, timelessness, the existence of time as one dimension of life, to account for the substance of what goes on in the life-span of those species affected by time – age, maturation, development, evolution, involution and so forth are all processes, that are substantial and consequential in many direct and indirect ways upon life.

More socially befitting comprehension can be extracted when we can scale the concept of time reversed, as hind sight and retrospection to make peace with time past and with a certain degree of anticipation or predictive validity, draw a time-table for time to come.

Since, I am not a physicist, it will be nice to hear your thoughts in relative parsimony and physical calculations and terms that can be easily understood.

Thanks,
Saira

thanks for your fun comment! I think the question of are you an outside observation or an enfolded observation is a deep one. I talk about it (I think) in my chapter of On Space and Time and have a take on it which I call `relative realism’. I am sure I will get to it in the blogs at some point. It also gives an angle to respect of others.

Hi Saad,

Clearly much to think about. My suggestion: take some of your ideas and try to develop some baby models, complete with equations, illustrating them. I’m not sure I see the difference between existing in `space’ and `spatially extended in space’.

But your comment brings to my mind an old question I like to pose: exactly WHERE are YOU? I mean to the nearest centimetre? If `you’ is located somewhere in the middle of your head. But you will agree that where you are exactly is
a but fuzzy with an error of about 10cm. OK? So WHEN exactly are you? Same problem. Keeping in mind that nerves signals
take time to travel, when you are is a bit fuzzy with an error of about 1/10 of a second perhaps depending on the complexity of the information that you consider `now’. Of course, there is fairly accurate agreed now, but what exactly is YOUR relationship to it?

I thought about this many years ago after reading the book by J.W. Dunne `An experiment with time’ where he describes his experience of premonitions, although without a theory. I am not sure if it really works, but since most things in biology are governed by gaussian (or some other) probability distributions, while most of you is in the centre of your perceived time, some parts of you will be at the extremes of the distribution, eg some will be ahead of the centre. This does not explain actual predictions but could explain the perception of a prediction, as a reverse deja vu. Nowdays this kind of timeshift technology is built into DVD players to take out ads and so forth. Well, just some idle thoughts.

The mystery of time, to me, is this: Am I an outside observation or an enfolded observation in the fabric of space/time? From a purely hopeful point of view, I am hoping I am an enfolded observation. In this vein, I try– unsuccessfully often, to be honest at least with myself– to adhere to a no-harm-to-others rule in my life with the belief that if I am wrong, then it doesn’t matter at all, and if I am right, then I will be aware “somewhen/somewhere” of all the actions of my life and their connection to everything and everybody around me and happy that I avoided from time to time doing harm myself by harming others.

Now, I think I will try to stay on the right side of the road–whatever that is!

Thanks for the comment. I am glad to hear about Einstein and Wheeler, definitely adds weight! I think, however, that to actually do the reversal requires much more of `rearrangement of everything’ than anyone is willing to contemplate, because it requires greater thought about OUR role in establishing what is present. This is also the key, in my opinion to the measurement problem and you make an interesting point about observers inside and outside the system (I am not sure I am with you on gravitational waves from the future and collapsing wave functions causing collapsing of the wave function, however). One point I should make is that when one takes a causal view of time as dictated by Relativity, light does not take any time to fall into the star, in its own rest frame as it were it takes no time at all. Its in our frame of the star that it takes time. The same is true for a person falling into a black hole, as you would know, from our perspective they never actually fall in but hover for ever on the horizon, but in their frame they get crushed to death in a finite time. In my chapter of the book I compare this with Schoedingers cat (dead or alive) paradox, I think there are parallels.

Wheeler once remarked that if there were only a few chunks of matter in the universe, the future would, in reality, affect the past…, Einstein also believed that the one-way flow of events that is observed is of statistical origin.
Several concepts still require serious clarification;e.g,Maxwell equations predict that light should travel in a straight line and its found to fall towards a star. The role of observers, being outside the system in quantum measurement, whilst being inside when looking at the universe. Also depending on their state of motion, they may reach different results of energy in vacum space. It is just possible( I am only speculating), that eventaully gravity’s advanced waves (coming from the future) may have the solution to the quantum measurement problem( the collapse of wave function).