Copyright 1998-2010 by Donald R. Tveter, http://www.dontveter.com, commercial use is prohibited. This material cannot be quoted at length or posted elsewhere on the net or included in CD ROM collections. Short quotations are permitted provided proper attribution is given.

As we said in the Haunted Mansion chapter, in the beginning people thought that there was a God controlling every detail of the world. Later Science showed that the matter in the universe followed some simple laws of physics and then many people assumed that the universe was working all by itself so that there was no need for a Creator at all. Later on quantum mechanics seemed to show that at the level of sub-atomic particles events even happen at random. Nevertheless there is a consistent message coming from modern physics, from special relativity, general relativity, quantum mechanics and Bell's theorem that gives us the idea of the block world or superdeterminism. That is, the whole universe, past, present and future just is and it is our consciousness that is moving through this world of matter. The purpose of this appendix is to show in some detail how these developments in modern physics all point to this conclusion.

The new viewpoint started with the results of special relativity. Albert Einstein had his theory of special relativity published in 1905. It is interesting that special relativity alone, a result that goes back over 100 years is enough to shatter our current view of reality but physicists have had trouble accepting the implications. At the end of the 19th Century physicists had noticed that light seems to behave like a wave rather than like a particle. Now they thought that a wave has to be a wave in something, like a wave in water or sound wave in the air so physicists were thinking that light was a wave in something they called the "ether". Now they thought that the Earth was traveling through this ether and so they should be able to find out how the Earth was moving relative to the ether. They thought they would be able to figure that out by measuring the speed of light in two different directions and finding a difference. Michelson and Morley did the experiment but instead of finding a difference they found that the speed of light was the same in every direction. This caused big trouble for conventional thinking. A physicist named H. A. Lorentz first came up with the formulas that explained this, the Lorentz transformation equations. The equations predicted things that were even worse for common sense thinking. It was Einstein who made sense of the whole situation.

Special relativity has to do with space, time and objects that are moving relative to each other at a constant speed. It works like this. Suppose you are sitting on the Earth and you watch a light wave go by at 186,000 miles per second. Suppose there is also a spaceship going by in the same direction as the light at a speed of 161,000 miles per second (that's 86.6% of the speed of light) so that from Earth the difference in the speed is 25,000 miles per second. So far, so good. But now jump on the spaceship. Measure the speed of that light. Common sense would say the light is going by at 186,000 - 161,000 = 25,000 miles per second. But it doesn't work that way. Even on the spaceship the light is still going by at 186,000 miles per second. To make things work out something has to give and distance and time are the only items available. So special relativity says that distances shrink and time slows down as you get close to the speed of light. There are plenty of experiments that show that space and time do shrink so everyone believes this even though it seems to be nuts. So as it turns out in the above spaceship example for people on Earth time ticks by seemingly normally but on the spaceship the clock is running half as fast compared to a clock on Earth. But then if you're on the spaceship time seems to tick by just as normally as it would on Earth. If, on Earth we see a star 4 light years away then on a spaceship passing by Earth and headed in the direction of the star at 161,000 miles per second you see it as only 2 light years away. As you go faster and faster time slows down even more. At 99.5% of the speed of light time will pass 1/10 as fast as on Earth and the distance will be 1/10 the distance you measure from Earth, that would be 4/10 light years. If you could get the spaceship to exactly the speed of light (but you can't and there is a good reason for this) then the distance it has to travel would be 0 and the time it takes to get there would of course then be 0. People never noticed these strange effects on distance and time before because at everyday speeds the difference is so small, the difference only becomes noticeable when you get close to the speed of light.

This leads us to the famous twin "paradox" example which isn't a paradox at all. Take two identical twins, they will have the same age to start with of course, put one on a spaceship traveling at 99.5% of the speed of light and it will take just a bit over 4/10 of a year to get to the star, then return this twin at the same speed and it takes just a bit over 4/10 of a year to get back for a total of just over 8/10 of a year. For the twin on Earth it looks like it took a bit over 4 years for his twin to get to the star and a bit over 4 years to get back. The twin on Earth ages just over 8 years while the twin on the spaceship ages just over 8/10 of a year. This result has been confirmed over and over for sub-atomic particles traveling at high speeds and particle accelerators have to be designed to take this fact into account in order for them to work at all. For more on this strange result, see for instance: Alternate View Column AV-38 by physicist John Cramer or google "twin paradox".

Besides distances shrinking and time slowing down when you get close to the speed of light a spaceship (and most other particles of matter) will increase in mass. For instance the spaceship that is traveling at 86.6% of the speed of light has a mass that is twice what it would be at rest. At 99.5% of the speed of light it has a mass that is ten times what it would be at rest. Once something gets close to the speed of light it takes more and more energy to make it go just a little bit faster because of this mass increase so to make something travel at the speed of light would require an infinite amount of energy and of course that's just not possible. A particle of light is called a photon and it only travels at the speed of light. It can do this because it has no rest mass. The really interesting thing is that for a photon the distance it travels shrinks down to nothing and the time it takes to go from one place to another also shrinks down to nothing. To quote astrophysicist John Gribbin from page 79 of his book, Schrodinger's Kittens and the Search for Reality

From the point of view of a photon, it takes no time at all to cross the 150 million km from the Sun to the Earth (or to cross the entire Universe), for the simple reason that this space interval does not exist for the photon.

Perhaps they are simply so stunned by what the equations say that they have not fully thought out the implications.

An amazing implication follows from this strange but simple result. Since photons get where they're going in no time at all it means the whole universe, from past to future has to be out there "at once". Suppose you take your flashlight outside and point it up into the sky and turn it on. One photon from your flashlight might travel a few feet to hit a particle of dust in the air. Another might go on for several hundred years to hit a spaceship traveling between the stars. Another photon might travel a billion years to make it to some distant planet where it hits the eye of some being looking through a telescope. For the photons it takes no time at all to get these places so the entire future has to be out there ready for photons leaving your flashlight now. The future that is a few feet away has to be there. The future that is several hundred years away has to be there. The future that is a billion years away has to be there. Everything but everything has to be "out there" "at once". This applies to things in the past too. If you stand outside there is light coming from distant stars that will end up hitting you. Each of these photons gets to you in no time from the perspective of the photons so the past has to be out there at the same time as well.

Here is another example. Suppose several hundred years in the future we have Captain Kirk and Mr. Spock on the starship Enterprise. Suppose, as they do on Star Trek that there is a way to travel around very quickly between planets using warp drive. Now this would have to be a sort of loophole in the laws of physics that lets you get around the limit on how fast you can go that comes from special relativity but assume it is true, in fact it may even be true, there may indeed be a loophole that allows this. Kirk might have to decide whether or not to visit Vulcan and Spock's relatives or visit the planet Raisa where he and the crew can get a rest. Kirk mulls this over for a few days and ultimately decides to go to Raisa. If you were shining your flashlight off in the direction of Raisa then some photons that left your flashlight "now" would end up hitting the Enterprise in orbit around Raisa. Those photons "knew" the Enterprise would be there at the time they left your flashlight "now". In effect they "knew" what Kirk would decide before he even made the decision, in fact they "knew" even before Kirk was born and the Enterprise was built!

To continue on Gribbin notes that if there was one atom in the entire universe and it wanted to radiate a photon, it couldn't because there was nowhere the photon could go. It has to "know" ahead of time what's out there and it has to make arrangements to go there before it leaves. So suppose you take your flashlight outside and you point it at some point in space where there is no matter out there in the future. No light will come out of your flashlight because it has no place to go!

Notice how this process differs from the way we normally think about reality. Normally people think the photons head out from the flashlight and then - BY CHANCE - they are absorbed by one atom or the other along their path - but again - they don't do that, they pick out a place to go before they leave and then they go there in no time at all from their perspective.

With the universe all out there "at once" the universe is a thing that just is, not something that is developing moment by moment. For instance here is one report on the consequences of relativity from physicist Robert Geroch in General Relativity from A to B, University of Chicago Press, 1978, pages 20-21:

There is no dynamics within space-time itself: nothing ever moves therein; nothing happens; nothing changes. In particular, one does not think of particles as moving through space-time, or as following along their world-lines. Rather, particles are just in space-time, once and for all, and the world-line represents, all at once, the complete life history of the particle.

When Geroch says that "there is no dynamics within space-time itself," he is not denying that the mosaic of the blockworld possesses patterns that can be described with dynamical laws. Nor is he denying the predictive and explanatory value of such laws. Rather, given the reality of all events in a blockworld, dynamics are not "event factories" that bring heretofore non-existent events (such as measurement outcomes) into being. Dynamical laws are not brute unexplained explainers that "produce" events. Geroch is advocating for what philosophers call Humeanism about laws. Namely, the claim is that dynamical laws are descriptions of regularities and not the brute explanation for such regularities. His point is that in a blockworld, Humeanism about laws is an obvious position to take because everything is just "there" from a "God's eye" (Archimedean) point of view. That is, all events past, present and future are equally "real" in a blockworld.

But even when the principle of relativity is construed narrowly, as in special relativity theory (SRT) so that its GRT generalization and Mach's principle are excluded, one is led from the absence of absolute simultaneity to the view that, in Weyl's [1949] words, "Reality simply is, it does not happen." That is, the past, present, and future all objectively exist. It is all fixed. There is no free will.

And of course if it is all fixed, this is where people really get disturbed. If all the matter is fixed from the beginning then people start to think that there is no room for free will! And people really want to hold on to the idea of free will. As I noted in the Haunted Mansion chapter I believe the problem of free will is easy to overcome if you assume there there is a human soul that is not made of matter.

If all this sounds pretty screwy, OK, sure it does sound screwy but special relativity makes specific preditions about certain things and these things do indeed happen. Modern particle accelerators are designed to accelerate sub-atomic particles to nearly the speed of light. Some of these particles are unstable and they break down very quickly into other particles when they are just sitting still but when they are in the accelerator traveling at nearly the speed of light time for them slows down and from outside the accelerator they end up lasting longer. The particles increase in mass just as special relativity predicts. Plus of course special relativity produced what must be the most famous physics equation in the world, E = mc². This makes possible atomic bombs and nuclear reactors and it explains where the sun and stars get their energy. The global positioning system (GPS) requires the use of special relativity in order to function correctly. For an overview of the many tests of special relativity see for instance: Why We Believe in Special Relativity or Experimental Basis of Special Relativity.

There is an interesting insight that comes from special relativity that can be applied to theology. Photons travel at the speed of light and for them distances shrink down to nothing and time stops altogether. It is as if everything is at the same place at the same time. It is only if you travel at less than the speed of light that places and time appear. With everything and everybody all at the same place at the same time you can see how God can know what everyone will do from the beginning of time out to at least the end of this universe. He can know what people will decide ahead of time. So He can know who will repent and who won't. He can make arrangements for people to have some useful experience in the present that will be important in their future.

Einstein published his theory of General Relativity in 1916. It has to do with space, time and objects that are accelerating relative to each other. If you take the equations of general relativity and just want to deal with objects that are not accelerating relative to each other, you just want to deal objects that are just moving at constant speeds relative to each other you get the equations of Special Relativity. So the two fit together very neatly and of course special relativity gets its name because it is a special case of general relativity.

General relativity (and for that matter, special relativity as well) united time and space into a single entity called space-time. It turns out that with general relativity space-time is curved by the mass of objects. From the conventional perspective (not the block world perspective) when we have an object being moved by "the force of gravity" all that is happening is that the object is moving along a straight line in space-time that is curved. General relativity improves on Sir Isaac Newton's simpler theory of gravity. Newton's theory predicted the orbits of most of the planets but it failed to exactly predict the orbit of Mercury. General Relativity did explain the orbit of Mercury plus it predicted that light from a star would be bent by the sun. The bending was quickly confirmed in 1919.

General Relativity makes many other predictions as well. One is that time slows down in a gravitational field and experiments have proven this as well. It predicts the existence of black holes and astronomers seem to have found some out there. It also makes the interesting prediction that the universe is expanding from a huge explosion (the Big Bang) at the beginning of time. General Relativity also predicts that there are gravitational waves. Physicists Russell Hulse and Robert Taylor received Nobel Prizes in physics for their study of a binary pulsar that was radiating gravitational waves. In the book, Shadows of the Mind (Oxford University Press, 1994, page 230) physicist Roger Penrose says that in their experiment:

... we find that the theory is confirmed overall to an error of no more than about 10^-14. This makes Einstein's general relativity, in this particular sense, the most accurately tested theory known to science!

General Relativity says other interesting and more complicated things as well. General Relativity re-enforces the idea that the past, present and the future all exist "at once" and so that time as we normally think about it just does not exist.

There is a nice explanation of the consequences of the equations of general relativity in the book, The River of Time by physicist Igor Novikov. In chapter 15, "Can We Change the Past?" Novikov explores the time travel paradoxes that are so often used in science fiction. Like the problem of the person who travels back in time and decides to kill himself or maybe to kill his grandfather to prevent himself from even being born. Novikov does it with a simpler set of problems. First let there be a wormhole in space where A is the entry point to the wormhole in the present. The wormhole connects with a location in the future called B. The equations of general relativity allow for such a wormhole to exist although they by no means require them to exist, maybe they exist and maybe they don't. Maybe people can engineer such a wormhole and maybe they can't. But now let's have a billiard ball moving through time and space past location A and toward the location B. It enters the wormhole at B and travels backward in time to emerge at A. An important thing to notice here is that if time travel is true it does away with the intuitive idea that the past is gone, the future is not yet here and only the present exists. If time travel is true clearly the past and the future have to "out there", they have to be as real as the present.

Now could the ball from the future come out of A in such a way as to hit the ball in the present and knock it off it's path to the location B? No! Things happen only once and it all has to be planned from the beginning. You could arrange for the ball from the future to knock it's earlier self into the wormhole at B however. That would work. Novikov says that if there's going to be a collision between the younger ball and the older ball then:

The effect of the collision should have been taken into account from the very beginning. Indeed the ball moves once only, and we cannot treat it's motion as collisionless once, and then as motion with collision. This means that the effect of the future (i.e. of the older ball arriving from the future) on the event must be considered from time 0.

The billiard balls could also be spaceships. The spaceship goes into B and comes out at A in time to see it's earlier self. Could a mad man on the spaceship now destroy the ship before it enters the wormhole at B? Or could the new version of the ship engage a tractor beam to force it away from the wormhole B? Or could the tractor beam be used to force the spaceship to enter the wormhole B? Or the billiard balls could be a person traveling through time. Could the person go into B, come out at A and try to kill his earlier self before he enters wormhole B? All these cases except for one cannot happen. Novikov does not say how a force might intervene to keep them from happening but if you realize that the whole universe has to be designed to be consistent from the very beginning you see that the paradoxes can't happen. The situations have to be designed from the very beginning. The only case that could happen is if the spaceship from the future used its tractor beam to force its earlier self into the wormhole B.

It all implies that the future and for that matter the past must all be out there "at once". People can IMAGINE things happening twice and they can say such things in words but in reality everything happens only once and so because of their imagination and how people use words the paradoxes you get in time travel stories can be talked about but they simply can't happen.

Novikov goes on to consider yet more cases but in all cases Novikov shows how the past, present and future must all be consistent. One statement from Novikov of that bottom line is:

Therefore, with the time machine, today's events must be consistent with (i.e. be determined by) not only the past but also the future! I formulated this self-consistency principle many years ago and now it appears to have been accepted by everyone who works in the time machine field. Recently I and my colleagues were able to prove that this principle can be deduced from the fundamental laws of physics.

These results specifically deal with time travel of course. Maybe there is no time travel going on in the universe. So far there are no known instances of things traveling backward in time. The examples are nice however because again they show how you have to figure out the history of the universe before you make it just like you have to write all of a book before you print it. Some experts in the field think time travel can indeed happen. If it did happen it would be subject to the consistency requirements noted above. And the consistency requirements match up with the block model of the universe we saw from special relativity.

Another odd result that came from the study of the equations of general relativity came from mathematician Kurt Gödel. He found a solution to Einstein's equations where a universe could just naturally bend back on itself. So you could get on a spaceship, travel consistently into the "future" and yet end up in the "past". What then does time mean? How could you say that the universe was so many years old when you travel into the "future" and end up in the "past"? How can you say there was a past, there is a present and the future is not out there yet? The Haunted Mansion analogy can be applied again here for this situation. When you take an amusement park ride you get off the ride very close to the place where you started, you "loop back in time" just like the solution Gödel found. Our universe does not have to be like that but again it implies that the whole universe is something that is just "out there" not something that develops moment by moment. That whole way of thinking is just obsolete.

Quantum mechanics deals with the movements of the very tiniest particles. These tiny particles don't move around the way large, heavy objects do, sometimes these "particles" behave "like a wave" and sometimes they behave "like a particle". Physicists quickly found equations that give the right answers as to where the particles may end up but the way these tiny particles move and interact with each doesn't seem to make any sense at all. One equation that correctly predicts how particles will move around is the Schrödinger wave equation from Erwin Schrödinger and it is the one that is talked about most often because it is a differential equation and physicists have always been used to dealing with differential equations. The other form is a matrix equation from Werner Heisenberg. Both forms predict exactly the same results and you can derive one from the other. But in both cases no one can tell what the heck is really going on because it is all so strange compared to the world that we are used to. The famous quote from physicist Richard Feynman is that "Nobody understands quantum mechanics."

There have been two basic responses to this mystery. One response is to just say, oh, hey, the equations work and let's not worry about why. The other response of course is to try and make sense of it all. The funny thing is though that people have come up with many different interpretations of quantum mechanics but none of them is very satisfying to everyone. Some of the interpretations have a mystical quality to them. Some of the interpretations point us toward the idea that, again, the past present and future must all be out there at once. Since relativity is telling us the same thing I believe that these interpretations should be taken very seriously.

First we will look at some of the many interpretations of quantum mechanics and then move on to some strange experimental results. Then there is Bell's Theorem. Then we'll note how another very new interpretation of quantum mechanics called the relational block world interpretation is said to make sense of all the mysterious results.

One new viewpoint comes from recent work by physicist Mark Hadley where Hadley sort of derives QM from GR by assuming particles are built a certain way. Hadley's proposed solution is especially interesting because it comes about by allowing particles to move backward in time along tiny wormholes like those described in the billiard ball example we've already seen for general relativity. For more on his theory see: A Gravitational Explanation of Quantum Theory. This is a very new idea and so far no one been able to derive either the Schrödinger or Heisenberg equations from it. It would certainly satisfy people who want a nuts and bolts interpretation of the world. The existence of these tiny wormholes would tell us that the past, present and the future are all out there and real at once and the present is formed jointly from the past and future.

Physicist John Cramer has an interesting interpretation of quantum mechanics that came about by merging relativity and quantum mechanics, see: The Transactional Interpretation of Quantum Mechanics. Cramer stresses that it is only an interpretation of what the equations say but the interpretation also uses the idea that the past, present and future are all out there at once.

Philosopher Huw Price argues in his paper, A Neglected Route to Realism About Quantum Mechanics, that if there is backward causation (the future influences the present and past) happening in the quantum world that would also explain the mysteries. Other physicists also consider this an option. Again, this implies that the past, present and future are all out there at once. For more on Price's idea, see also:

• Time's Arrow and Archimedes' Point by Huw Price
• Huw Price - Home Page
• Locality, Independece and the Pro-Liberty Bell by Huw Price
• http://plato.stanford.edu/entries/causation-backwards.

One of the features of quantum mechanics is that the movement of particles is not deterministic. That means that you can never predict for certain where a moving particle is going to end up. As we said before, it is a flip of a coin or a roll of the dice. Some of the physicists who developed quantum mechanics never liked the uncertainty of it all. Einstein's famous quote is: "God does not play dice". The fact that the results of a quantum mechanical experiment are not deterministic is one big reason why people have said that relativity and quantum mechanics are inconsistent and they have tried to find a way to resolve this apparent inconsistency.

Another physicist who believed that quantum mechanics ought to be deterministic was David Bohm. He managed to prove that beneath the rules of quantum mechanics there could be yet deeper rules that produced what looked like randomness. He also split the Schrödinger equation into two parts, one that showed that the tiniest particles behaved just like big things and a second part that showed a "quantum force" that moved them around in odd ways. Some people have speculated that the quantum force is what the religious community calls "spirit". Bohm also proposed that behind the scenes there was some kind of structure of information that told them where to move. Bohm called it the implicate order. Bohm also compared the world to a hologram in which everything across all of space and time is related to everything else across all of space and time.

The many worlds interpretation of quantum mechanics says that at every point in the history of the universe a particle can go any which way and in fact the particle splits up into a huge number of particles each of which go off into a separate universe of its own. Using this interpretation of quantum mechanics there is a different version of you in each one of those universes. As the differences accumulate over time the yous in each universe become more and more different. Many science fiction stories have been based on this idea when someone discovers a way to to travel between universes. One of the classics is when the good Enterprise of the Federation is in orbit around a planet, Kirk uses the transporter just when something strange is happening and Kirk ends up on a different version of the Enterprise where the ship is part of Earth's empire, the crewmembers are mostly evil and Spock has a beard. For some phenomena this intepretation works pretty nicely. A lot of critics don't like it. For instance they often ask where is the energy coming from to create all that extra matter? One of the founders of this interpretation was physicist John Wheeler but he later gave up on it because he said it carried too much metaphysical baggage. Other physicists still take it seriously.

The Copenhagen Interpretation came from Neils Bohr. It was the first one that seemed to most physicists to actually give them a reliable way of thinking about quantum mechanics and so it is the one that is the most widely taught and believed. The Copenhagen Interpretation is perhaps the most mystical one of all. One of its basic ideas is that there is no real world out there but nevertheless every time you make a measurement or observe a phenomenon you do get some specific numerical value that pops up out of a fog of possibilities. Critics have come up with numerous objections to this interpretation. One really amazing idea that is implied by the Copenhagen interpretation is that an object such as the moon is not really there unless someone looks at it and then and only then does it become real. And of course after you stop looking at it it becomes unreal again! An even more interesting question is, would the Universe itself be here if no one was looking at it? Does it mean that there is a Someone (God) outside the Universe looking at it so as to make it real? So the Copenhagen interpretation where nothing is real until a measurement is made is at odds with the block world that comes from relativity that says that everything has been fixed in advance. This is a second reason why physicists have said that relativity and quantum mechanics are incompatible and need to be reconciled.

On a religious note, New Age believers have used the Copenhagen Interpretation as evidence that people have a certain mystical, magical ability to create the kind of world that they want. You can find otherwise down-to-earth physicists promoting this idea. It is a perspective that is in direct opposition to what the God of the Bible said in Genesis 1, He said that He created everything and then rested from His acts of creation on the seventh yom.

Another feature of the Copenhagen Interpretation is that in order to calculate what will happen to a particle in a quantum mechanical experiment you have to take a look at what will happen to the particle in the future. So this interpretation acknowledges that the future will impact the present.

There are a lot of experiments that people will discuss when talking about these interpretations of quantum mechanics but we will try and keep the details to a minimum. The most famous one is called the double slit experiment where you pass photons or some other sub-atomic particles through a pair of slits. On the other side of the slits there might be equipment set up to detect a particle or equipment set up to detect a wave. It turns out if you're looking for a particle you find it. If you're looking for a wave the experiment finds a wave. What then are these "particles"? The Copenhagen intepretation says that they're nothing until you look and it depends on how you choose to look.

Plus the double slit experiment gets worse than that. Physicists think that the particle ought to "decide" whether it will behave "like a wave" or "like a particle" when it passes by the slits. It really should behave like a wave and pass through both slits or like a particle and pass through only one slit when it is there at the slits. But it won't know how to behave until the end of it's journey when it encounters the equipment on the other side! Yet the particles seem to know their future! They seem to know what they will run into later on. The future seems to be affecting the present. This brings to mind the example of writing a book where what happens in chapter 3 (the future) affects what happens in chapter 2 (the present).

Besides the double slit experiment there are a number of other similar experiments that all show the same thing. You can even have an experiment where the choice of what is farther along the particle's path is made after the particle enters the experimental apparatus. This type of experiment is called a delayed choice experiment. In these experiments the choice as to what the particle encounters in the future isn't even made until the particle enters the apparatus and the choice is made very quickly and at random by a very fast computer. In these experiments the particles always know what is out there in their future even before the choice is made and they behave accordingly. In Schrödinger's Kittens and the Search for Reality p 142 Gribbin describes one experiment where this was shown in a laboratory setting and then talks about how in principle the same experiment could be done using light from a distant quasar. Speaking of this proposed experiment Gribbin says:

The whole Universe seems to 'know', in advance, what experiment an individual is going to carry out, perhaps on a mountain top in Chile, some time in the next few years.

Then there is a type of experiment called an EPR experiment. These experiments originated as a thought experiment devised by Einstein, Podolsky and Rosen (hence EPR). Over the years a number of them have been proposed but it is only in recent years that the experiments have actually been done and they always confirm the predictions of quantum mechanics. One experiment by Alain Aspect and others in the 1980s is an important one so we will take a look at it. It is also a delayed choice type of experiment.

The Aspect experiment starts with a source that emits a pair of photons. Photons have a property called polarization and when this pair of photons is formed the values of their polarizations will be related to each other in a certain way. After this pair is created one photon runs to the left and the other one runs to the right. As they near their destinations an optical switch changes their directions at random and each photon ends up at one detector or another detector. At the end of their journeys their polarizations are measured. It turns out that what you measure on one side of the experiment affects the results you get on the other side of the experiment. The polarizations of the two photons are related in the way quantum mechanics predicts so the conclusion is that somehow each one "knows" what is happening to the other one. The experiment was repeated on a larger scale using optical fibers to carry the photons to the detectors with the detectors 11 kilometers, or seven miles apart by physicist Nicolus Gisin and his team at the University of Geneva. They got the same results, the particles "know" what is happening at the other end even though they are very far apart.

According to the Copenhagen intepretation as the photons travel along they don't have any value for their polarizations at all. But when you measure the polarization of one it finally takes on a value and it automatically forces the other one to take on a related value. The mystery as it turns out for people who believe in the Copenhagen interpretation is that the other photon gets its value instantly. It gets it even faster than if the first photon sends a message to the other one at the speed of light. And so this seems to be a dramatic proof of non-locality, that is, something that happens to one particle at one point in space and time has an effect on another particle so far away in space and time that a message can't get to the other one at the speed of light. Einstein called it "spooky action at a distance" and he really did not like it. To remedy the situation Einstein proposed that there are hidden variables, that is, there are physical properties for the photon that have not yet been discovered and observed that determine this and that therefore quantum mechanics has to be incomplete. David Bohm's work on quantum mechanics showed that there could be such hidden variables.

Price and others have offered the idea that backward causation is at work. Backward causation would work like this. Suppose we make a movie of the photons forming at the source and moving on to their final destinations where they are measured. Now run the movie backwards. You end up seeing the photons coming together at the time they were formed and then what values they have at that time are determined by what will (or should we say did) happen to them in the future.

In a related experiment Antoine Suarez and another team did something even more complicated. They repeated the Gisin experiment but set the photon detectors into motion, something that brings in special relativity with more complicating factors. Besides the strangeness in Special Relativity that we have already seen another strange effect is possible. With observers moving relative to each other it is possible for one observer to say that event A happened before event B while another observer will say that B happened before A. Both of them are equally valid perspectives and there is no perspective that physicists can find that is any better. The effect is called the relativity of simultaniety. In this experiment they arranged for detectors on each end of the experiment to be the first one to make an observation. So on the left side of the experiment the measurement of one photon will force the photon on the right side to be something or other. But from the right side it will appear as if the measurement of the photon there will force the one on the left side to take on a value. This experiment exposes a serious flaw with the Copenhagen Interpretation. The CI says that one forces the other but from special relativity we know that there is no perspective that is better than any other one. The CI implicitly says there will be a best perspective in every experiment but when you look at this experiment you see that there just can't be. Using that CI perspective they thought that the correlations between photons would disappear but as it turned out they did not and they still got the results predicted by quantum mechanics. In the paper, Entanglement and Time by Suarez, he reports:

In the nonlocal quantum realm there is dependence without time, things are going on but the time doesn't seem to pass here.

If the speed of quantum information is indeed infinite, or non-existing we are left with two remaining alternatives: either space-time or free will is an illusion. I am tempted to vote for the first one!

You can look at this experiment and say that this result from quantum mechancis is a stunning confirmation of the block world where everything is set up to work in advance, indeed it shows that things MUST be set up in advance. For more on this experiment see the Center for Quantum Philosophy.

Quantum mechanics is an unsettled subject because nobody agrees on what is really going on with sub-atomic particles. In the past people would say that all the interpretations work and there is no way to choose one over the other however some experiments in recent years have been interpreted to cast doubt on the Copenhagen Interpretation. One in particular, the Afshar experiment has been interpreted as disproving the Copenhagen Interpretation and the Many Worlds Interpretation, see: A Farewell to Copenhagen by Cramer. Cramer and some other physicists agree with this result while others do not. In addition Cramer says the Afshar experiment is consistent with his Transactional Interpretation. Physicists are continuing to try and figure out what's really happening in these quantum mechanical experiments. At any rate it looks like quantum mechanics is telling us the same thing that special relativity is telling us: the past, present and future are all out there at once and it's all fixed.

A physicist named John Bell didn't like the Copenhagen interpretation either and he set out to study quantum mechanics, EPR experiments and what they imply. He discovered an amazing result called Bell's Theorem but this never led to an answer that satisfied him or anyone else who was interested in preserving reality as we believe it to be.

Bell's Theorem has to do with the number of sub-atomic particles that have certain properties. In using Bell's Theorem you derive an inequality where the number of particles with certain properties should be greater than or equal to the number of particles with certain other properties. Everyone thinks this theorem is perfectly reasonable and correct. Unfortunately when you use Bell's Theorem with quantum mechanics you get disturbing results such as this one:

from "A Background Essay" by James T. Cushing in Philosophical Consequences of Quantum Theory: Reflections on Bell's Theorem, James T. Cushing and Ernan McMullin, editors, University of Notre Dame Press, Notre Dame, Indiana, 1989, p8. Other examples you can find in the literature produce other inequalities that are obviously false. Plus you get the same unsettling results when you do the actual quantum mechanical experiments where you count particles with those properties. Nature and the equations of quantum mechanics are in agreement but physicists are left stunned. So it's pretty upsetting to say the least. When a contradiction like this shows up logicians will tell you that some of the assumptions that went into your proof are false. So physicists have tried to figure out what detail or details they missed. One list of possible assumptions to worry about is this one from the page, Bell's Theorem by physicist David Harrison:

• Logic is valid.
• There is a reality separate from its observation
• Locality.

People who look at the list usually assume that their logic must be correct, so most people figure that that's not the problem. The part about there being a reality separate from its observation is something people usually assume as well. Most people then think that the third choice, locality is not true.

Then there is another assumption that goes into Bell's Theorem that can be challenged. Suppose your quantum mechanical experiment has two observation points where the person running the experiment can make a choice and a measurement. At the first point (in time) you'll have a random variable A which you measure and at the second point (in time) you'll have a random variable B you can measure. Suppose at the first point you set your experimental setting to a and at the second point you set your experimental setting to b. Bell's theorem assumes that what values a person chooses for a and b are completely free and unrelated. The person is free to choose any values whatsoever. In mathematics it means that the probability of getting the readings A and B at the first and second points given the free choice of settings a and b will be:

For a simple example from probability theory where this equation works suppose first you choose to flip a coin and then second you choose to roll a die. The settings a and b are flip and roll. The two tests are completely unrelated and the formula works, A and B are said to be independent random variables. For a case where you don't have independent random variables so that the formula does not work there is the case of Professor Bertlmann's socks. Professor Bertlmann always made a point of wearing two different color socks. So if you know one sock is pink you automatically know the other sock is not pink. The two choices are not independent due to the way professor Bertlmann chooses socks. In the proof of Bell's theorem if it turns out that assumption A.1 is not true Laloe points out that:

... it is easy to see that the proof of the Bell theorem is no longer possible ... (p49)

But this way of arranging quantum mechanical correlations would be even more mind boggling than one in which causal chains go faster than light. Apparently separate parts of the world would be deeply and conspiratorially entangled, and our apparent free will will be entangled with them. (p 16)

So one way to deal with the strange results from Bell's theorem is to just throw out Bell's theorem on the grounds that decisions that you make now are partially determined by decisions you will make (have made) in the future. The idea that conditions in the future can influence decisions in the present is an interesting one from the Christian perspective. Perhaps the person who will be (is) with the Lord in Heaven could influence their earlier self to realize that Jesus is the way. As Jesus put it "I know my sheep and my sheep know me." Perhaps backward causation makes it possible for his sheep to know him on an intuitive level. Assuming that God is aware of all the decisions that people have already made (and He should be) God can go and build a physical world around those decisions. Of course it remains to be seen how it is that a person can have free will. Price actually proposes that just because a person's decision in the future influences that person's decision in the present does not mean that a person does not have free will.

But the overall situation with the quantum mechanical experiments is actually worse because the decisions that are made in the quantum mechanical experiments don't have to be made by people, they can be made by very fast computers and then how would a machine in the present be influenced by some other machine in the future? There is no way that a digital computer in the future could influence the digital computer in the present. Clearly a God who knows everything would be able to make everything work out. And this leads to the idea that the whole physical world is superdetermined. Quoting Bell from Schrödinger's Kittens and the Search for Reality, page 177 of the 1995 hardcover edition from Little, Brown and Company Gribbin says:

'You know,' he (Bell) told Paul Davies, 'one of the ways of understanding this business is to say that the world is super-deterministic.' In other words, absolutely everything is predetermined, including the experimenter's choice of what measurements to make in the Aspect experiment. If free will is a complete illusion, this gets us out of the crisis.

Also physicists J. Brian Pitts and W.C. Schieve comment on the consequences of superdeterminism: footnote

One also knows that the experiments violating the Bell inequalities are compatible with the orthodox relativity if one is prepared to embrace "superdeterminism" ... . However, this view's demanding philosophical underpinnings, such as its denial of (libertarian) free will and evident need for an all-determining Agent to correlate the initial conditions of the world, might limit its appeal ...

On the other hand, the 3 major monotheistic traditions all have (or had) strands that affirm theological determinism: Pharisaic Judaism [55], Reformed/Calvinist Christianity, and Islam. That there might be a natural affinity here is suggested by the language (e.g., ( [47]) about events being "already 'written in a book'." The resemblance to Psalm 139:16 (NASB) cannot be accidental:

Thine eyes have seen my unformed substance; And in Thy book they were all written, The days that were ordained for me, When as yet there was not one of them.

There is no final opinion among physicists on the meaning of Bell's Theorem yet. The most common belief right now is that non-locality is true and everything across all of space and time is connected to everything else perhaps by faster than light influences. One physicist, Henry Stapp has called this the most profound discovery in Science. Physicists typically go that far but then they do not like to go on to the logical conclusion that all of the universe across all of space and time really all has to be there at once, the same result we see from relativity. Again this is mainly due to the idea that the block world eliminates free will and physicists want to hang on to free will.

Here are some pages with more perspective on Bell's Theorem:

• Bell's Theorem.
• Gettingit.com: Reality Ain't What It Used To Be
• Spooky Action at a Distance: An Explanation of Bell's Theorem.

Now there is a very recent addition to the list of interpretations of quantum mechanics called the relational block world interpretation of quantum mechanics. It starts with the block world that comes from special relativity. Its proponents claim that it explains all the quantum mysteries. Details of this interpretation can be found in these rather advanced physics papers: rbw1, rbw2, rbw3, rbw4, rbw5 and rbw6. One of the important claims cited in these papers is, for instance from, "An Argument for 4D Blockworld from a Geometric Interpretation of Non-relativistic Quantum Mechanics" by Silberstein, Cifone and Stuckey, page 10 they say: (rbw4)

... what is not widely appreciated are a collection of formal results showing that quantum theory and the relativity of simultaneity are not only compatible, but in fact are intimately related.

In the relational block world interpretation, as in the block world we have from special relativity, nothing is actually happening, there are no particles moving around, nothing ever changes and there is no collapse of the wave function. Then what to us with our normal everyday perspective looks like a particle moving forward in time is in fact more like a string that starts somewhere, it continues on some distance and then ends. As we move by this string all we see is a little tiny piece of it and that merely makes us think we are seeing a particle moving from the past into the future. This idea assumes the universe is made out of something that looks continuous, like, say plaster. Another proposal for what the universe is really like can be found in the book, The End of Time by physicist Julian Barbour. He proposes that time is not continuous but instead each instant of the universe is like a frame in a movie. Here in each frame there still are particles that stay put in each frame, but in the next frame the particles are in a slightly different location. Either way, whether the universe is continuous like plaster or discrete like a movie film it is only our consciousness moving through the universe that gives us the impression that things are moving around. Consciousness moves, not things, the things are forever frozen in place.

Now at several places in this book I've used the idea that particles seem to know what will happen to them in the future and then they behave just the right way in the present. For instance in the double slit experiment when a particle reaches the slits it has to "decide" what to do, behave like a wave and go through both slits or behave like a particle and go through only one. And what they "choose" to do now depends on what will happen to them in the future on the other side of the slits. To use a human analogy it is as if the particles know what tomorrow's winning lottery numbers will be. In the block world this just isn't happening. The particles don't "sense" the future and then "decide". Everything was carved in stone in advance. It just is. Then for that matter maybe even our idea that there are particles out there is based on our warped perspective of the way things seem to be. By the time all the physics is settled people may see the idea of particles moving around as an old-fashioned idea that nevertheless works most of the time. In this book I have used the idea of particles knowing in advance what will happen to them in the future and then deciding as an analogy about how human beings make choices. I've said that perhaps people make choices based on what will happen to them in the future. Particles are one thing and people are another. People because they have a soul may well make decisions based on what will happen in the future even though the particles do not. So the particles making choices based on the future analogy is useful even though it apparently is not the way particles really behave.

Relativity, quantum mechanics and Bell's Theorem are gigantic developments in modern science but there are some smaller ones that also point to superdeterminism. One of them is Wheeler-Feynman absorber theory. The problem Wheeler and Feynman were working on was to figure out why charged particles like electrons and protons resist being moved. Of course uncharged particles also resist being moved due to the fact that they have mass but charged particles resist being moved even more than uncharged particles. Wheeler-Feynman absorber theory manages to get just the right value for this resistance by assuming that when the charged particle is moved it sends out waves into the past and the future. Now in the 1860s physicist James Clerk Maxwell produced a set of equations that describe electricity and magnetism called Maxwell's equations. Maxwell's equations have two solutions. One solution that shows that electromagnetic waves travel into the future and the other solution shows that they travel into the past. Physicists had always ignored the wave that would be traveling into the past because no one has ever seen such a thing and that didn't even make sense to people at the time anyway. As it turns out though these waves traveling into the past interact with all the other charged particles in the universe, all of which jiggle a little and put out still more waves that travel around the universe into the past and the future. When all the results are totaled up they show that the waves traveling into the past get cancelled out by all the waves radiating around the universe and that's why we never see them, we only see the waves that travel into the future. This whole scheme only works if the universe is closed so that waves going into the future are all eventually reflected back into the past. So this is more evidence for everything being out there at once.

Earlier I quoted from Woodward who mentioned Mach's principle. Mach's principle was a proposal by Ernst Mach that says that when you try and push on an uncharged object and it resists, the resistance is coming from all the other matter in the universe, even from very distant galaxies. So this is quite similar to Wheeler-Feynman absorber theory. Some physicists believe that General Relativity includes Mach's principle and others do not. Woodward is trying to find evidence for this effect. (See footnote x). On the other hand some other researchers have a different idea for the origin of inertia so this issue of the origin of inertia is not yet settled.

One other small item is the Wheeler-DeWitt equation. For many years physicists have thought that there should be an improved version of general relativity where values are quantized as they are in quantum electrodynamics. Quantum electrodynamics is the improved quantum mechancial version of Maxwell's classical equations that describe electricity and magnetism. Even though physicists have been searching for a long time this improved theory has not been found although the Wheeler-DeWitt equation is one result from this search. The Wheeler-DeWitt equation resulted from combining General Relativity and Quantum Mechanics. The amazing result is that there is no time in this equation! Physicists have no idea what to make of that.

Physicists have been faced with the disturbing results and implications of modern physics for a long time, special relativity started it and it is over 100 years old. They have been well aware of them but at the same time they couldn't believe them. What the results all add up to is that we are on the verge of a major revolution in our concept of what the world is like. Relativity, quantum mechanics, various experiments and Bell's Theorem all point to a world that has been fixed ahead of time. The idea that things happen at random just doesn't fit in with the results of modern physics. Once upon a time it looked so much like the sun went around the Earth that people had trouble accepting the new idea. And they couldn't believe that the continents move. People have had trouble with the speed of light being the same for every observer and now they're having trouble with what that implies. The new viewpoint is good for traditional Biblical views of God and how He operates.

Are the Past and Future Really Out There by James F. Woodward from Annales de la Fondation Louis de Broglie 28, 549-568 (2003). [Invited paper for a commemorative issue honoring the 60th anniversary of the completion of Olivier Costa de Beauregard's doctoral work with Prince Louis de Broglie.]

Flat Spacetime Gravitation with a Preferred Foliation by J. Brian Pitts and W. C. Schieve, see pages 6 and 7.

For the relational block world interpretation see:

Deflating Quantum Mysteries via the Relational Blockworld Authors: W. M. Stuckey, Michael Silberstein, Michael Cifone

and

Reconciling Spacetime and the Quantum: Relational Blockworld and the Quantum Liar Paradox by W. M. Stuckey, Michael Silberstein and Michael Cifone in Foundations of Physics, Springer, Volume 38, Number 4 / April, 2008 Pages 348-383 Includes Geroch and Dainton quotes. Also at Reconciling Spacetime and the Quantum: Relational Blockworld and the Quantum Liar Paradox

and

Unification per the Relational Blockworld, Authors: W.M. Stuckey, Michael Silberstein

and

REVERSING THE ARROW OF EXPLANATION IN THE RELATIONAL BLOCKWORLD: WHY TEMPORAL BECOMING, THE DYNAMICAL BRAIN AND THE EXTERNAL WORLD ARE ALL "IN THE MIND" by MARK STUCKEY, MICHAEL SILBERSTEIN and MICHAEL CIFONE

and

An Argument for 4D Blockworld from a Geometric Interpretation of Non-relativistic Quantum Mechanics.

and

Genuine Fortuitousness, Relational Blockworld, Realism, and Time by Daniel J. Peterson, December 13, 2007.

Bertlmann's socks and the nature of reality. J. Phys. Colloq. 42, C22 (1981) pp.C2.41-C2.62 and also John S. Bell on the Foundations of Quantum Mechanics, pp.126-147 and also from Niels Bohr Centennial Symposium, Boston, MA, USA, 12 - 14 Nov 1985, pp.245-266