English Other General / Conversation / Greetings / Letters science, quantistic

So here’s what Aharonov says: forget what you think you know about time. For starters, it’s not about a progression of moments. Instead, time is actually about the flow of information. For us, it flows only forwards: we have information from the past, but we can’t access information from the future. However, the deeper reality is that time – and by that I mean the flow of information – runs both forwards and backwards. And if you know how to access that future information, you can resolve the mysteries of the present.
You’re probably thinking of astrology. Aharonov is thinking of two controversial ideas in quantum physics called weak measurement and post-selection.
A weak measurement is a measurement that doesn’t disturb the system enough to change it significantly. Imagine you want to learn the mass of a bicycle that is moving at speed. To measure it properly, you’d have to stop it, and put it on a set of scales. But you can gain a tiny sense of its mass by giving it a little sideways nudge as it passes. It will deviate from its course for a moment, but it recovers and continues forward. The amount of deviation, compared with the effort you put into the nudge, will have given you some sense of the bicycle’s mass. That’s a weak measurement. The point about a weak measurement is that you gain a small amount of information that is clothed with a huge amount of uncertainty. In other words, you have learned something, but you’re not sure whether it is true. However, if you probe the system enough times, you may achieve a consistency to the answers that convinces you of their essential correctness.
Applied to measurements on a photon in a double slit experiment, Aharonov says, that gives you a new capability. Throughout those weak measurements, the photon’s state is a mix of its past state and its future state. In other words, it contains information from the future. And so your weak measurement is recording a tiny sliver of what the future holds.
But for Aharonov, that is not quite enough heresy. He also advocates discarding experimental results that you don’t want.