Can people really influence the physical world with thought alone?

[NoJo]

The question posed by the title of this thread begs so many questions and carries with it so much baggage of blinkered ignorance I get a twinge of irritation every time I read it! To clarify the muddle-headedness would, as I said in an early post, require more words than are worth shouting, because frankly, judging by the entrenchment in most people's posts here I doubt if anyone would actually listen!

Some of this searching for the inexplicable is founded on "Is That All There Is?", a misguided longing for mystery in the world. It's misguided because there is still a lot to be marvelled at, uncontested phenomena that are nevertheless fundamentally strange and literally extra-ordinary, without looking at the bleeding edges of science:

For me, action at a distance, which was first properly propounded 400 years ago by Kepler, is still the supreme mystery. Newton developed this into the rigourous, beautiful theory of Universal Gravitation.

The theory of antimatter being matter travelling backwards in time, and all its attendant paradoxes, is another.

How about renormalization, which is the (well-proven) theory that matter arises literally ex nihilo -- out of nothing?

Entanglement or instant influence across space is much subtler than both of these, and in one form or another been part of physicists' thought since the Quantum Theory istelf.

But back to the mind:

My own work with the University of London involves biofeedback, which is basically using your mind to control one or more bodily functions which are normally considered to be autonomous: Like your temperature, heart rate, skin resistance, or blood pressure. It works a treat: It's easy to do, and most people are delighted to find that they can perform this trick. It's related to those other ill-understood but perfectly genuine phenomena, hypnosis and the placebo effect.

The prodigious creative feats, such as the beautiful works created by Austistic Artists such as Stephen Wiltshire point to a really deep mystery as to how minds work!

The amazing feats of memory, first described scientifically by the Brilliant Russian brain-reseatcher Luria in his classic book "Mind of a Mnemonist" seventy years ago, are still inexplicable.

 

[past_perfect]

My own work with the University of London involves biofeedback, which is basically using your mind to control one or more bodily functions which are normally considered to be autonomous: Like your temperature, heart rate, skin resistance, or blood pressure. It works a treat: It's easy to do, and most people are delighted to find that they can perform this trick. It's related to those other ill-understood but perfectly genuine phenomena, hypnosis and the placebo effect.

Cool - I was fascinated when reading Schwartz and Beatty in the 80's - any current publications you would recommend? I suppose a lot has happened since (darn, I am fucking old, aren't I?).

 

[Epmd607]

I...

I take it that the reason you want these issues discussed is to mount a "more things in heaven and earth than are dreamed of in your philosopy, Horatio" argument. That is, since we have these cases which seem to defy the laws of physics, all of physics is suspect, so anything goes, including the possibility that exotic quantum effects are at work in our brains.

Quantum mechanics has become infamous as the last refuge of the psychic, the religious, the mystic, anyone who wants to accord some extraordinary power to human consciousness as a molder of reality. (Poor Werner Heisenberg has been more misunderstood than anyone in physics.) On another forum years ago I read the postings of a PhD in physics who invoked quantum processes in the brain in an attempt to explain consciousness. The quantum argument these people basically use is: we really don't know anything (Heisenberg), so anything is possible.
...

Shout out to Dr. M for answering well for a nonspecialist. There are plenty of Nobel Physicists who've gone on to debunk New Age nonsense, paranormal research, ESP specifically. The paranormal researcher is usually not a specialist(a phd) in any field that resembles cog science, psychology, physics, bio-chem. Sheldrake may well be a specialist in biochem, but he's shown his interest is more in publishing books for popular consumption and giving a good stage act than actually publishing in the field of biochem.

The others usually present themselves as Dr., want to talk about quantum physics resulting in transfer of information between brains, and at best maybe they have a degree in history. It would be like a solid-state physicist presenting themselves as a specialist in the field of art history. Quantum physics as an explanation for everything paranormal shows up in the work of Deepak Chopra(best selling mystic), soap operas, ghost hunting shows where they look for very slight changes in the constantly fluctuating EM field.

Marginal ideas that result in a new understanding of nature are done within the scientific framework that's been around since before Newton. Einstein was heretical for a minute, or a decade in there, then he was doctrine and went on to point out the heresy of Heisenberg, Pauli, and Schrodinger. He got over it, nominated Pauli for a Nobel Prize for his heresy.

Here's a selected Sheldrake Biblio:

# Seven Experiments That Could Change the World: a do-it-yourself guide to revolutionary science, New York, NY: Riverhead Books, 1995. ISBN 1573220140.
# Dogs that Know When Their Owners are Coming Home: and other unexplained powers of animals, New York, NY: Crown, 1999. ISBN 0609600923.
# The Sense of Being Stared At: and other aspects of the extended mind, New York, NY: Crown Publishers, 2003. ISBN 060960807X.
# Chaos, Creativity and Cosmic Consciousness, Rochester, VT: Park Street Press, 2001. ISBN 0892819774.
# The Evolutionary Mind: conversations on science, imagination & spirit, Rhinebeck, NY: Monkfish Book Pub. Co., 2005. ISBN 0974935972.
The Physics of Angels: exploring the realm where science and spirit meet, San Francisco, CA: HarperSanFrancisco, 1996. ISBN 0060628642.

 

[Epmd607]

...

The theory of antimatter being matter travelling backwards in time, and all its attendant paradoxes, is another.

How about renormalization, which is the (well-proven) theory that matter arises literally ex nihilo -- out of nothing?
...

My own work with the University of London involves biofeedback, which is basically using your mind to control one or more bodily functions which are normally considered to be autonomous: Like your temperature, heart rate, skin resistance, or blood pressure. It works a treat: It's easy to do, and most people are delighted to find that they can perform this trick. It's related to those other ill-understood but perfectly genuine phenomena, hypnosis and the placebo effect.

Antimatter exists. The description of antimatter being matter traveling back in time is far from a conventional theory of what antimatter is.

Dick Feynman, one of the founders of QED:

"The shell game that we play ... is technically called 'renormalization'. But no matter how clever the word, it is still what I would call a dippy process! Having to resort to such hocus-pocus has prevented us from proving that the theory of quantum electrodynamics is mathematically self-consistent. It's surprising that the theory still hasn't been proved self-consistent one way or the other by now; I suspect that renormalization is not mathematically legitimate."

from Wikipedia:

"If a theory featuring renormalization (e.g. QED) can only be sensibly interpreted as an effective field theory, i.e. as an approximation reflecting human ignorance about the workings of nature, then the problem remains of discovering a more accurate theory that does not have these renormalization problems. As Lewis Ryder has put it, "In the Quantum Theory, these [classical] divergences do not disappear; on the contrary, they appear to get worse. And despite the comparative success of renormalisation theory the feeling remains that there ought to be a more satisfactory way of doing things."

This just shows that nonspecialists can make Quantum Physics(QED and Entanglement) sound like it may lead to ESP and then the existence of hidden animals.

In 7th grade biology we were told to take our heart rate then think about the characteristics of the girl we liked and why we liked her, then we were told to take our heart rate again. Jogging is a choice you can make to speed up your heart. 'Autonomous' is misleading and so is 'Placebo'. There's nothing fantastic about the creation of ulcers do to stress and the amelioration of body pain after counseling.

Hypnosis is a trance-like 'attitude' of mind people enter into willingly(usually anticipating some fantastic trauma to explain their shitty life or very real depression) that's why everyone isn't suitable for hypnosis. Hypnosis produces no special results when used as a clinical aid as opposed to non-hypnotic counseling. You get repressed memories of alien abductions and past lives and mundane memories of childhood traumas that never occurred, people keep smoking and get fatter. Hypnosis doesn't get at the subconscious, if the subconscious even exists.

Just to make this clear. The Placebo Effect describes the idea of a drug as useful as an actual drug. People take blood pressure meds, the thought of taking blood pressure meds would have to treat the person as well as those who've actually taken the drug. Sometimes a drug is useless, sometimes a different state of mind will relieve stress as opposed to a drug that does nothing. That's an easy one for biofeedback people, should be able to hit that one out of the park. Yet, Placebo hasn't even been shown in blood pressure control groups. How is Placebo gonna treat a real disease like atherosclerosis?

 

[NoJo]

I believe that in general, people know more than they know they know.

I still lay my Rider Waite Tarot occasionally. I understand it for what it is, a stimulus to my imagination and intuition, like Ouija, The Tarot, I-Ching, and countless other Rorschach-like tools.

People who use the counter-intuitive ideas of modern physics to explain mental processes generally understand little of either.

Prior to all of this, anyone generally seeking answers to questions of nature and magic (I don't see a lot of them posting here, but I do see a lot of entrenched prejudice and vacuous quotations which neither support nor counter any arguments being made), needs to think slowly and carefully about the key words in the thread title:

"Physical World" is heavily encumbered with the ancient weight of Plato: The dichotomy between physical and non-physical is insidious, but it's a completely spurious one.

"Thought" -- Well I've seen a quadriplegic operating a PC mouse with "thought alone". I've seen animals that think, although I'm still not ready to say I've seen a computer (or more likely, a robot) that can think, even though I think it's not impossible to achieve. But, "Thought" needs much careful consideration prior to answering the question.

"Influence" or "Cause" -- like the issue of quantum entanglement, influence and causation can cause problems. Originally extended from the simple case of a man throwing a spear or rolling a ball, causation came to be depersonalised, into what's known a "effective cause", with no intelligent agent, either human or divine, being present. But where people ARE involved in the phenomenon to be described, then there are many possible levels of causation that could be under discussion. Does your mind make the chess piece move? Or the muscles in your arm? Or, perhaps, your opponent causes it to move, by putting your king in Check?

 

[Epmd607]

...
Prior to all of this, anyone generally seeking answers to questions of nature and magic (I don't see a lot of them posting here, but I do see a lot of entrenched prejudice and vacuous quotations which neither support nor counter any arguments being made), needs to think slowly and carefully...

"The theory of antimatter being matter travelling backwards in time, and all its attendant paradoxes, is another."

No one has said anything as vacuous as this, or any of the other statements of fact you've made about quantum mechanics or science. Your specialty is what? As a lab tech for a pretend scientist? You get to declare how discourse will run on this thread? Nope. You're just some guy on an Internet message board who doesn't know how to participate in an argument--just like Pure, you're buds.

 

[dr_mabeuse]

I believe that in general, people know more than they know they know.

I still lay my Rider Waite Tarot occasionally. I understand it for what it is, a stimulus to my imagination and intuition, like Ouija, The Tarot, I-Ching, and countless other Rorschach-like tools.

Yes. Lest I come across as some hard-headed science-worshipping materialist, I'd like to say that I play with Tarot all the time too (I use the Crowley deck), and on occasion I even let the results influence my behavior as if they were truly predictive.

I've had some hair-raising experiences with the cards too, predictions and analyses that were startlingly accurate, and I respect the tarot to the point where I'm afraid to ask the deck certain questions. I seem to have a great affinity for the cards. They work for me.

So how do I reconcile my scientific skepticism with my tarot use? Quite simply, I don't. There's scientific truth, and there's tarot truth and they don't work the same way. It's similar to the way the truths we get from science differ from the truths we get from art and religion, and just what that difference is I can't quite say. Sometimes I think it's rational vs. emotional truth, but there's more to it than that. I just know that I wouldn't want to live in a world without both of them.

I'm a great fan of the supernatural, an avid would-be believer, always looking for a way to include magic in the world. I still believe Carlos Castenada was telling the truth in his Don Juan books about there being alternate realities that are available to us, and I believe in the validity of the drug experience--that the things we perceive under the influence of drugs like LSD are valid interpretations of reality, not just the ravings of an intoxicated mind. While I'm an unapologetic advocate of the rigors of the scientific method, I also bitterly resent the limitations scientific laws place on our freedom and potential, and I'm always looking for ontological loopholes, anomalies, and arational wiggle room. I love the supernatural because the supernatural means freedom and possibility, the triumph of imagination over ratiocination. It's probably because I want so badly for miracles to occur that I examine the supposed ones with such skepticism.

So I can argue this issue from either pro or con. If the OP had asked, "Why Thought Doesn't Influence the Material World," I would have happily jumped in on the pro-psi side. The fact that I'm both a believer and a non-believer doesn't bother me in the least. There's a host of attitudes you can have on a subject besides believing or not-believing.

 

[Epmd607]

"Thought" -- Well I've seen a quadriplegic operating a PC mouse with "thought alone". I've seen animals that think, although I'm still not ready to say I've seen a computer (or more likely, a robot) that can think, even though I think it's not impossible to achieve. But, "Thought" needs much careful consideration prior to answering the question.

I've never seen this, can I get a link? Most quads operate PCs by devices that react to the limited muscle movements they retain, such as straw in mouth, movement of eyes.

 

[Liar]

I've never seen this, can I get a link? Most quads operate PCs by devices that react to the limited muscle movements they retain, such as straw in mouth, movement of eyes.

There are lots of advances made in neural implantants. I sawa documentary where a guy had one stuck in his brain and controlled a computer user interface. No mouse though, but I don't see how that would be impossible.

Things is, at least at the moment, we can't map the brain to say which neurons control what (althogh we can usually get close). But we can stick stuff in that reacts to the neurons' currents, and then the brain will adapt and literally re-program itself to achieve the desired effect with practice.

There are also neural pacemakers that helps people with parkinson's and epilepsy with a well measures zap once in a while.

This is believed by computer scientists to be the secret behind the brain and real intelligenge as opposed to the computing power of a, well, computer. It's not a processing unit, it's a network.

 

[dr_mabeuse]

"The theory of antimatter being matter travelling backwards in time, and all its attendant paradoxes, is another."

No one has said anything as vacuous as this, or any of the other statements of fact you've made about quantum mechanics or science. Your specialty is what? As a lab tech for a pretend scientist? You get to declare how discourse will run on this thread? Nope. You're just some guy on an Internet message board who doesn't know how to participate in an argument--just like Pure, you're buds.

Take a pill, friend, and calm down. There's really no reason to get personal and insulting about things.

It turns out there is a way to formulate the laws of physics so that antimatter can indeed be seen as matter traveling backwards in time. It's a mathematical formality and the math works.

It turns out we have to select certain prime variables when we start dealing with physics, the basic dimensions we're going to use to measure the universe and the events within it. The ones usually chosen are the ones that are intuitive: distance, mass, electrical charge, time, and a few others. From these, all other measurements can be obtained.

But it's possible to use different parameters and derive these usual ones from there. Thus, speed is distance/time, but time is also distance/speed, or maybe distance/dC, percentage of some constant, like the speed of light. Thus, time becomes a function of velocity rather than velocity being a function of time.

So it turns out, the choice of prime variables is somewhat arbitrary. We can state the laws of physics in terms of the usual dimensions: meters, kg, seconds, etc., or we can express them in terms of force, charge, and momentum, or any of another sets of parameters.

In any case, it turns out that in one of these systems, antimatter can be described by a very elegant equation whose only peculiarity is the inclusion of a negative sign before the time variable. In other words, mathematically, antimatter is indistinguishable from regular matter traveling backwards in time. Matter, spin, charge, etc. are all conserved and no principles are violated. (Well, no particle physics principles. The second law of thermodynamics is broken by things moving backwards in time.)

So it's entirely legitimate to describe anti-matter as matter moving backwards in time. The fact that it makes no sense to us isn't really nature's concern. The math works, the equations are predictive and accurate, and the system is apparently consistent. That's all you can ask of a scientific theory.

But speaking of negatives and violating principles, I have to say, Epmd, that you are one rude and self-centered son of a bitch, and you're really getting tiresome. You don't know anything about the people you're criticizing or what kinds of letters they have after their names (and I assure you, some of them have a lot more than you do), and if you can't appreciate their posts for what they are, then I'd suggest you do us a favor and either keep quiet about it or couch your questions in more civil terms. We're not idiots, and believe it or not, it's not our function on this board to keep Epmd entertained.

We have enough smug, self-satisfied people around here as it is, and we really don't need that crass and vindictive mockery whenever you fail to understand someone's point in a post. That kind of crap just about destroyed this forum not very long ago. and we don't need to go back to that.

Thank you.

 

[Epmd607]

Take a pill, friend, and calm down. There's really no reason to get personal and insulting about things.

It turns out there is a way to formulate the laws of physics so that antimatter can indeed be seen as matter traveling backwards in time. It's a mathematical formality and the math works.

It turns out we have to select certain prime variables when we start dealing with physics, the basic dimensions we're going to use to measure the universe and the events within it. The ones usually chosen are the ones that are intuitive: distance, mass, electrical charge, time, and a few others. From these, all other measurements can be obtained.

But it's possible to use different parameters and derive these usual ones from there. Thus, speed is distance/time, but time is also distance/speed, or maybe distance/dC, percentage of some constant, like the speed of light. Thus, time becomes a function of velocity rather than velocity being a function of time.

So it turns out, the choice of prime variables is somewhat arbitrary. We can state the laws of physics in terms of the usual dimensions: meters, kg, seconds, etc., or we can express them in terms of force, charge, and momentum, or any of another sets of parameters.

In any case, it turns out that in one of these systems, antimatter can be described by a very elegant equation whose only peculiarity is the inclusion of a negative sign before the time variable. In other words, mathematically, antimatter is indistinguishable from regular matter traveling backwards in time. Matter, spin, charge, etc. are all conserved and no principles are violated. (Well, no particle physics principles. The second law of thermodynamics is broken by things moving backwards in time.)

So it's entirely legitimate to describe anti-matter as matter moving backwards in time. The fact that it makes no sense to us isn't really nature's concern. The math works, the equations are predictive and accurate, and the system is apparently consistent. That's all you can ask of a scientific theory.

But speaking of negatives and violating principles, I have to say, Epmd, that you are one rude and self-centered son of a bitch, and you're really getting tiresome. You don't know anything about the people you're criticizing or what kinds of letters they have after their names (and I assure you, some of them have a lot more than you do), and if you can't appreciate their posts for what they are, then I'd suggest you do us a favor and either keep quiet about it or couch your questions in more civil terms. We're not idiots, and believe it or not, it's not our function on this board to keep Epmd entertained.

We have enough smug, self-satisfied people around here as it is, and we really don't need that crass and vindictive mockery whenever you fail to understand someone's point in a post. That kind of crap just about destroyed this forum not very long ago. and we don't need to go back to that.

Thank you.

Okay Scholar of the Hour. You write porno, same as me. You're the king of the porno web publishing universe, I'll go back to the poetry message board and relinquish your realm. BDSM is a fetish(superficial sex play) with an affect of intimacy. My degree's in physical anthropology from Cornell. I have a job in finance because of the school I went to, not because of any special skills I acquired in college.

"In any case, it turns out that in one of these systems, antimatter can be described by a very elegant equation whose only peculiarity is the inclusion of a negative sign before the time variable. In other words, mathematically, antimatter is indistinguishable from regular matter traveling backwards in time."

Except, antimatter isn't actually matter traveling back in time, the math is a tool to make the model work. The math does not show that antimatter is matter traveling back in time, retard.

 

[NoJo]

Yes. Lest I come across as some hard-headed science-worshipping materialist, I'd like to say that I play with Tarot all the time too (I use the Crowley deck), and on occasion I even let the results influence my behavior as if they were truly predictive.

I'm not sure what the Tarot used to mean to me -- In my twenties I would lay it for other people and through it learn about their experiences, hopes and fears and desires. Although I was not aware of it, it was the probably classic gypsy-tent techniques of masking a question as a statement, using non-verbal cues and responses from the subject:

"You've lost something -- or you're worried you might lose something. Something, or someone. A woman, no, sorry a man..", et cetera

With myself, it's rather like tossing a coin when you can't make a decision, and then sneakily tossing it again until it comes out the way you secretly want it. Except with Tarot there's no heads and tails, so the cards always come out the way you want them. But the beauty of cards, is that they're richly bejeweled with Jungian symbol and tell half-remembered but eternal stories of another life, which lends them a powerful explosive energy that hurls your waking mind down deeper than is possible with mere introspection, and bringing it face to face with the strange creatures that inhabit the silent ocean bed of your persona. There, with luck, you can feel the subtle but irresistible currents which are your true hopes and desires.

And it was a great way of picking up chicks.

 

[jomar]

Paranormal activity has been studies for decades. Has actually anything been 'proven' yet?

I recall a somewhat recentish story about a scientific woman who traveled the world looking for new plants for pharmaceuticals. She had had a bad accident or something in the past that damaged some internal organ which flared up now and again (details wrong, gist correct). She fell sickly deep in the jungle and a female shaman looked her over. They did not speak each others language and the researcher did not point and clue her in. Her shirt was on and the shaman zeroed in on the damaged area, pushed and pressed and manipulated the areas and reset the organs (that's what it was! the accident pushed the organs out of place!), hurt the researcher and all but long story short no more flareups. She was stunned.

So what was the shaman responding to and zeroing in on? Kirlian fields? Micro-expressions? Something else so far unknown and undetectable?

And my mother drives me crazy - an accident and she had a feeling it would happen; a disaster and there was a prior sense...I tell her to record it and seal it in an envelope, then we'll see. Never happens.

So, I remain open, but skeptical and you'll have to prove it to me.

 

[JAMESBJOHNSON]

JOMAR

Crisis psychotherapy is the same. When the patient walks in or calls its imperative for you to tune-in, identify the real problem, and select the right remedy....because people come to you for all kinds of reasons, and much of the time they cant articulate whats wrong.

I'm convinced the magic is right-brain processing because the right-brain is where pattern recognition and creativity and analysis happens inside our skulls. Shamans and witch-doctors and medicine men do it better because their brains havent been turned to mush by Western education indoctrination.

 

[dr_mabeuse]

Back in the 70's, the Me decade, I was talked into taking a self-improvement course called Silva Mind Control. I suppose it was basically self-hypnosis, but they also promised to increase our "psychic powers". Yeah, right.

At the end of the first day we were supposed to think of something we wanted as a test of our powers. I was terribkly skeptical and couldn't come up with anything profound, so I said I wanted a new guitar.

Sure enough, that night a friend called. He was getting rid of some stuff and asked me if I wanted a guitar. It surprised me so much that I didn't even associate it with the wish I'd made in class till several days later.

The next day in class we did remote viewing. We split into groups of two, and while one of us thought of a friend or family member, the other would somehow find this person and see them and be able to diagnose anything wrong with them. I was extremely skeptical, to the point where I found the exercise kind of embarrassing.

But I did it, and when it was time for me to view my partner's patient, I envisioned a man and there was something wrong with his armpits, of all places. So what the hell, I told my partner what I'd seen and he was polite but a little confused. He said there was nothing wrong with his friend's armpits but that he'd recently had foot surgery.

Next day (it was a 3-day course) my partner came to class and immediately took me aside. He told me he'd talked to his friend last night to see how he was doing, and his friend said his foot was fine but his armpits were killing him because his crutches were too high.

The most interesting part of this story, though, was my reaction to these two rather unsettling events. I just didn't believe them. I just couldn't accept that this mind-control business worked. Basically, I wasn't prepared to believe them. I filed them under the Isn't-That-Weird file and went back to my everyday life. I never used either of those techniques again.

 

[JAMESBJOHNSON]

ELLIOTT

Harry Stack Sullivan, MD, said that the therapist-patient relationship is what cures people, and the therapist better have a good outcome in mind....meaning dont exploit the patient for money or sex or ego-trips or whatever. On some level of understanding patient's know what youre up to. The 'cures' happen because they trust you enough to risk change.

Silva Mind Control and other, similar modalities, work on the same principle of change. That is, you spin your brain around like a kaleidoscope barrel until you get the right pattern.

 

[Recidiva]

I worked for a lady who ran a cable New Age program in NYC for a while and I was sent to lots of programs like Silva, or Insight, to write on the experience, interview people. Fortunately for me that means I got to go for free. I went to lots of retreats and symposiums and workshops.

Reminded me to a large extent of my experiences in the theater or religious retreats. Groups of people bonding and creating an environment of faith. Met a lot of very interesting people who could do cool things, but also came to my conclusion about money around that period.

Programs like Silva Mind Control or Insight or any other number of programs ultimately gave me the oogies. I was struck by the emotional bonding that happened, and also struck by the...lack of ethics. The thrust seemed to be about gaining influence over others and gaining control of your own life - at the expense of the consent of others. They're secular programs, but they seem to nominate the individual as the all-powerful God that can get away with murder if they're charming and convincing enough. Creepy for me, particularly if you continue the training very far in and spend lots of money (fortunately I didn't have to, but lots around me did) and are ultimately expecting to have some solid skills that will create profit for the individual. It gets more solidly into the manipulation and away from the "feel good" empowerment.

There's no doubt that Silva and Insight and other programs provide people the belief they need to tap into some stuff that's there all the time for most everyone. But I think the trade-off is that there's no type of ethical system in place. Even Wicca suffers from this, there's a schism between practitioners who practice the rede "An it harm none, do as ye will." and those who think that harm is the just deserts of anyone they disagree with. And then there are those who just think nothing they do can be construed as "harm" and take no responsibility either way for the results of their actions, mundane or otherwise.

You don't really need special powers to have your ethics eroded and reinforced to serve only the individual's needs, and feel powerful to boot.

 

[xssve]

My own guess is that quantum entanglement doesn't happen due to Heisenberg's uncertainty principle. It's simply impossible to know the spin or mass or charge of one of these virtual particles with any sort of meaningful confidence. But that's just a guess.

Anyhow, out of my league.

What's important though, is to remember that just because quantum mechanics is weird, that doesn't mean Big Foot is real. It's supremely unlikely that quantum effects have anything to do with how our brains work.

But it does make it possible.

Everything affects everything, chaos theory - at best one can argue that those effects may be greater or lesser according to the ratio of kinetic/potential energy they exhibit w/regard to other forces.

Lol, I can't write kineticotential - it's the devil!

 

[dr_mabeuse]

Except, antimatter isn't actually matter traveling back in time, the math is a tool to make the model work. The math does not show that antimatter is matter traveling back in time, retard.

Well, that started this retard thinking, and he respectfully disagrees. The model is derived from the math. The math comes first, and all we have with certainty is the math. What it models is pretty much anyone's guess, as long as it's predictive. On the sub-atomic scale, all the models based on macro systems break down. Atoms really aren't like little billiard balls or solar systems, and electrons really aren't little balls flying through space. We have nothing in our normal world that can serve as a model for these micro systems, so the math is really all we have.

Take the Heisenberg equation, one of the great mathematical truths of physics. There's no agreement on what it models. For some scholars, it means our measurements perturb the system we're measuring. For others it's an inescapable consequence of the wave-particle duality of matter. But all we know for sure is that there's a necessary uncertainty when trying to determine both the position and momentum of a particle, and that Heisenberg's equation nails the size of that uncertainty.

Or the Shroedinger Equation. The equation itself merely says that the energy of the system is equal to the energy of a standing wave. But the solutions to the Shroedinger equation give you what? Clouds of probability density that show the chances of finding an electron in a given area of space. How does probability density translate into material terms? What does it mean?

We're not sure. We only know the math is right. when you plug in some values, it spits out the correct orbital shapes and energies for electrons around a nucleus.

So just how is time defined in physics? What are we talking about when we talk about time? If we know that, then maybe we can get an idea of what negative time means.

Physics deals with changes of states. A-->B We call that conceptual space in which that change happens "time". The problem is so obvious that we never think of it, but how do we know in which direction time is traveling? We assume time moves "forward" but "forward" is a metaphor taken from things moving in space. We really don't know what it means in this context.

You can describe two cars speeding toward each other in positive time, or you can describe the same two cars speeding away from each other in negative time. The results are mathematically indistinguishable when it comes to predictive power. The math doesn't judge. It's either right or it's wrong.

The first place I'm aware of where the direction of time is necessarily defined in physics is in the 2nd law of thermodynamics, which deals with matter in bulk. This says that the entropy (disorder) of any closed system increases over time. In fact, the 2nd law is often known as "time's arrow" because it defines what time is: increasing entropy. Increasing entropy is thus a sign that we've been moving in positive time. An open vial of perfume in a closed room is a highly ordered system. In time, all the perfume will evaporate and be randomly mixed with the air in the room: maximum disorder. We can tell how much time has passed by the degree of disorder, by how much perfume is in the air. That, as far as I can tell, is the physics definition of time.

But entropy can be reversed through the input of energy. If the change we're examining is not irreversible, the energy can be used to reduce the entropy and return the system to an earlier state. That's tantamount to reversing time for the system. We reverse time for our closed room system by filtering out all the perfume molecules and getting them back into the vial.

On a macro scale we'd reverse time if we could put every atom and particle in the locality back to where it was in some previous time. In that sense there's nothing mysterious about negative time. It's just highly anti-entropic.

Christ. I need a pill.