Has time sprouted a leak?

[Vatman]

Putting Time in a (Leaky) Bottle
By Sharon Begley
July 30, 2007
http://www.msnbc.msn.com/id/19875410/si ... ek/page/0/

You can tell a lot about a subject by who its muses and mascots are. Neuroscience has philosophers who wax profound about the mind, geology has intrepid explorers and subatomic physics has ... Alice in Wonderland. "Curiouser and curiouser," as Alice said, also describes the subatomic, or quantum, world. With age, this centenarian (quantum physics is 107 years old) has gotten more bizarre. "The surprises keep coming," says physicist David Albert of Columbia University. None is greater than finding loopholes in the hallowed uncertainty principle—and, even more outlandishly, seeing hints that the future may leak into the present.

[...]

In the meantime, experiments have put detectors on the far side of the blinds. If the blinds are open and the detectors peek at the slits, photons fly through only one slit and no zebra stripes form. If the blinds are closed so the detectors cannot see the slits, photons fly through both and form the stripes. Here's the twist: if the blinds open only after photons have passed the slits but before they reach the blinds, the stripes fail to form even though the photons have seemingly done what they must to form stripes—namely, fly through two slits, as they always do when unobserved. The act of observing alters what the photons did earlier, somehow changing things so they passed through one slit and not two. There are "many histories" a photon could have, such as passing through one slit or two, Davies writes in his new book, "Cosmic Jackpot." Making a measurement "chooses which [history] existed."

That interpretation remains speculative, but weak measurements may indeed show that "something that happens now is affected by something that happens in the future," says physicist Jeff Tollaksen of George Mason University. "It suggests that the universe has a destiny—a destiny that is out there and coming back to us from the future." Maybe physicists should replace Alice with a new muse: Trafalmadorians, who in Kurt Vonnegut's "Slaughterhouse-Five" saw past, present and future all at once like a landscape, each moment ever present.

[Nah]

do you have any aspirin?