Hiya!
Gosh, I really tumbled down the rabbit hole about time this weekend, especially after talking to a friend I haven’t seen in eight years. He lives in India, which is also where we met by chance. One day we both happened to attend a ceremony where hundreds of people gathered to send positive energy into the world. We hung out for about two hours, and I’ve never seen him in person again. Though somehow, we’ve maintained a close friendship ever since.
Anyway, as fate would have it, we video chatted recently for the first time in probably three years. He’s in New Delhi, which is about thirteen hours ahead of where I am in the Pacific Northwest, and at one point, I made the lame joke about talking to the future. He laughed then said, “No, no. There is no time, only now.” His sentiment isn’t new, but it lodged in my mind nonetheless. Over the years, scientists have discovered some pretty mind-bending possibilities about what time is and how it works, but is what my friend said plausible? Is time nothing more than an invention by human imagination? Or something else entirely?
Quick Recap
We talked about time in Curious Adventure also. More specifically, a recent study found evidence that time flows forward and backward on a quantum level. However, for reasons scientists have yet to fully understand, most quantum systems capable of such actions tend to flow forward in time, more often than going backward.
These results reminded me about the charm meson particle we talked about a while ago. The slower rate that the charm meson particle osculates—flips back and forth— between being a particle and an antiparticle is unique compared to other meson particles. Now scientists wonder if the slower rate is critical in explaining why there is more matter than antimatter in the universe. Could the same be said for time? If more quantum systems move forward, rather than backward, in time, could that explain why we experience time moving forward?
Though, even if time mostly moves forward, why don’t we ever experience moments when time does move backward? Are we too large to recognize when it happens, or is something else going on?
This train of thought reminded me of another previous discovery we talked about a few months ago about how time travel might work. A fourth-year undergrad mathematically solved one of the biggest paradoxes surrounding time travel. He claims that according to his verified calculations, even if time travel were possible, we couldn’t actually change anything in the past because time auto-adjusts and recalibrates itself to ensure that events still occur regardless of interruption.
Perhaps that’s what the quantum systems which move backward in time are doing. Could they be responsible for the recalibration of past events? Actually, this kinda ties into another discovery about time I learned about—maybe our bodies can’t time travel, but it appears our intentions might be able to.
Can Intentions Travel Back in Time?
Cause and effect are one of the most seemingly evident Truths in Life, where events always happen in the same order — if X causes Y, then X must occur before Y happens. Well, turns out that might not always be the case.