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In my last posting, I referenced the video called The Yoga of Time Travel, Part 2 by The Theosophical Society.

Besides the focus on Self discussed in that video, there were three other concepts that really jumped out at me:

1. Light (a photon) has no concept of time or distance. While traveling at a speed of... well, light, it perceives itself as always in the same place in the eternal now.
2. The Color Phi phenomenon which is available as an on-line demontration. This phenomenon has been used to debunk Cartesian materialism, which claims the brain's functions can be completely explained by the laws of physics, without any need for an immaterial mind. In other words, the brain is like a biological computer, rather than an adjunct to a soul.
3. We can perceive things before they occur.
   

It is this last one that really intrigued me. I came across another video by the same guy called Your Brain Can Send Information Back in Time. This video is purportedly an except from the low budget documentary "What the Bleep Do We Know?" which critics maintain has about as many erroneous facts and half-truths as a Michael Moore film.

Now I once read an article speculating about how a baseball player can send information a fraction of a second into the past at the moment he swings and connects to hit a home run. This emotional charge sends a ripple into the immediate past and the batter capable of sensing this, has the image of success and thus adjusts the swing of the bat to hit it exactly where the impression of the future hit will occur. Unfortunately, I no longer have the reference to the article, but the basic premise here is similar. The idea is that we are capable of perceiving things a brief instant before the actually occur.

This concept of retrocausality is also discussed in a Jan 2007 article "Science hopes to change events that have already occurred". The basic idea of the experiment is split a laser beam into two using a crystal and sending each one through a double slit to a photon detector. This gives the experimenter the choice of measuring photons as waves or particles, while also helping to track photon pairs. A photon arriving at one detector should have its twin appear at the other. This is based on the principle that if they are linked by their properties (such as momentum), then they showed the same wave-or-particle behavior as one another. So the way you measure one effectively sends a signal to the other one instantaneously - a highly controversial claim, since it would seem to demonstrate faster-than-light travel. Taking it once step further, instead of just splitting the laser beam, run the photons you choose how to measure through several kilometers of coiled-up fiber-optic cable, thereby delaying them by microseconds. This delay means that the other beam will arrive at its detector before you make your choice. However, since the rules of quantum mechanics are indifferent to the timing of measurements, the state of the other beam should correspond to how you choose to measure the delayed beam. The effect of your choice can be seen, in principle, before you have even made it.

In a 2005 New York Times article "Remembrance of Things Future: The Mystery of Time" by Dennis Overbye, the theory of "quantum gravity" is discussed. He states: "Einstein's theory of relativity is incompatible, mathematically and philosophically, with the quirky rules known as quantum mechanics that describe the microscopic randomness that fills this elegantly curved expanding space-time. According to relativity, nature is continuous, smooth and orderly; in quantum theory the world is jumpy and discontinuous. The sacred laws of physics are correct only on average." Quantum gravity attempts to join this pair. If we could see lengths down to 10 -33 centimeters, even ordinary space and time dissolve into a boiling mess called "space-time foam." At that level of reality, clocks and rulers as we know them cease to exist.

Back in 1992 A. Zee discussed "Time Reversal". The article poses the question: Can you tell the past from the future? Physicists can't - not yet, anyway. Put another way: Can a bunch of physicists determine whether a movie is being played forward or backward?

This all relates to the concept called "the arrow of time". There are several types of arrows

• The psychological arrow of time, a subjective feeling that time flows mercilessly from the past to the future.
• The thermodynamic arrow of time, that physicists speak of apply to physical systems invariably becoming ever more disordered.
• The expansion of the universe arrow of time.

Zee states "The big question is whether, and how, these arrows are related to one another. In particular, we would all like to know how our psychological arrow of time comes about, and then, of course, whether we can reverse this arrow."

Let's compare the concept of time reversal with space reversal.

• Space reversal is symmetry between left and right.
• Time reversal is symmetry between past and future.

Every time we look in a mirror we have arranged for space reversal. Correspondingly we can now show a bunch of physicists a movie reflected in a mirror. Way back in 1957 physicists figured out how to tell that they are seeing the movie in a mirror. Let's get even more exciting and show a movie reflected in a mirror running backwards. What this all involves experimentally is back a the subatomic level. In physics terminology this is referred to as an electric dipole moment. The basic concept is that under time reversal, magnetic fields reverse directions, but electric fields do not.

The article "Can This Black Box See Into the Future?" states "It is possible - in theory - that time may not just move forwards but backwards, too. And if time ebbs and flows like the tides in the sea, it might just be possible to foretell major world events. We would, in effect, be 'remembering' things that had taken place in our future." The article goes on to propose that if it's possible for it to happen in physics, then it can happen in our minds, too. There is a tantalizing body of evidence to support this theory that we can see into the future. This led to the Global Consciousness Project, or EGG project. The purpose of this project is to examine subtle correlations that appear to reflect the presence and activity of consciousness in the world.