by Tim Swartz
from ConspiracyJournal Website
Time is a funny thing. There never seems to be enough – yet there is an infinite amount. Time slips through moment upon second into eternity past; yet present, to begin the future.
Time is thought to be unstoppable in its relentless push towards the future. Humans perceive themselves as bound up in time as an insect in amber. Forever imprisoned and forced to reconcile with the regularity and inevitability of change. The past is gone — the present, fleeting — and the future is unknown. Or is it?
If a Merseyside policeman by the name of Frank was asked, he may have an entirely different opinion on the subject of time.
On a sunny Saturday afternoon in July of 1996, Frank and his wife, Carol was visiting Liverpool’s Bold Street area for some shopping. At Central Station, the pair split up; Carol went to Dillons Bookshop and Frank went to HMV to look for a CD he wanted. As he walked up the incline near the Lyceum Post Office/Café building that lead onto Bold Street, Frank suddenly noticed he had entered a strange “oasis of quietness.”
Suddenly, a small box van that looked like something out of the 1950s sped across his path, honking its horn as it narrowly missed him. Frank noticed the name on the van’s side: “Caplan’s.” When he looked down, the confused policeman saw that he was unexpectedly standing in the road. The off-duty policeman crossed the road and saw that Dillons Book Store now had “Cripps” over its entrances. More confused, he looked in to see not books, but women’s handbags and shoes.
Looking around, Frank realized people were dressed in clothes that appeared to be from the 1940s. Suddenly, he spotted a young girl in her early 20’s dressed in a lime-colored sleeveless top. The handbag she was carrying had a popular brand name on it, which reassured the policeman that maybe he was still partly in 1996. It was a paradox, but he was relieved, and he followed the girl into Cripps.
As the pair went inside, Frank watched in amazement as the interior of the building completely changed in a flash to that of Dillons Bookshop of 1996. The girl turned to leave and Frank lightly grasped the girl’s arm to attract attention and said,
“Did you see that?”
She replied, “Yeah! I thought it was a clothes shop. I was going to look around, but it’s a bookshop.”
It was later determined that Cripps and Caplan’s were businesses based in Liverpool during the 1950s. Whether these businesses were based in the locations specified in the story has not been confirmed. 1
Frank’s experience is not that unusual in the realm of strange phenomenon. There is even a name given to such events — time slips.
A time slip is an event where it appears that some other era has briefly intruded on the present. A time slip seems to be spontaneous in nature and localization, but there are places on the planet that seem to be more prone than others to time slip events. As well, some people may be more inclined to experience time slips than others.
If time then is the unmovable force that physicists say it is, why do some people have experiences that seem to flaunt this concept?
THE NATURE OF TIME
Much of ancient Greek philosophy was concerned with understanding the concept of eternity, and the subject of time is central to all the world’s religions and cultures. Can the flow of time be stopped or slowed? Certainly some mystics thought so.
Angelus Silesius, a 17th-century philosopher and poet, thought the flow of time could be suspended by mental powers:
Time is of your own making;
its clock ticks in your head.
The moment you stop thought
time too stops dead.
The line between science and mysticism sometimes grows thin. Today physicists would agree that time is one of the strangest properties of our universe. In fact, there is a story circulating among scientists of an immigrant to America who has lost his watch. He walks up to a man on a New York street and asks, “Please, Sir, what is time?” The scientist replies, “I’m sorry, you’ll have to ask a philosopher. I’m just a physicist.”
Time travel, according to modern scientific theory, may still be beyond our grasp. Yet for a number of people who have had unusual time slip experiences, time may be easier to circumnavigate than expected.
A classic example of a time slip can be seen in a note from Lyn in Australia. Lyn had read the book, Time Travel: A How-To Insiders Guide, (Global Communications, 1999) and thought her experience was similar to others featured in the book.
In 1997 Lyn lived in a small outback town that was built in 1947 and had changed little since that time.
“I was driving toward the main intersection of the town, when suddenly I felt a change in the air. It wasn’t the classic colder feeling, but a change, like a shift in atmosphere. The air felt denser somehow. As I slowed at the intersection, I seemed to be suddenly transported back in time to approximately 1950.
The road was dirt, the trees were gone and coming toward me to cross the intersection was an old black car, something like a Vanguard or old FJ Holden. As the car passed through the intersection the driver was looking back at me in total astonishment before he accelerated. From what I could see he was dressed in similar 1950s fashion, complete with hat.
“This whole episode lasted perhaps 20 seconds and was repeated at least 5 times during my time there, always at the exact spot. I tried to make out the registration plate number but the car was covered in dust.”
Lyn wondered if there is someone out there still living who remembers seeing a strange sight at the intersection back in the 50s… of a weird car with a bug-eyed woman at the wheel. 2
Derek E. tells another interesting time slip story. When he was a child, his father was a taxi driver in Glasgow, Scotland. One day in the late 1960s, Derek’s father was driving in the north of the city along Maryhill Road near Queen’s Cross, one of the older parts of town and once its own separate community outside the city.
“One minute it was now,” Derek wrote, “cars, buses, modern clothes, tarmac roads etc. – and the next thing my dad knew he was in some earlier time. It was certainly pre-Victorian given the clothes he described people wearing, horses, rough road, lower buildings, people in rough clothes and bonnets etc. It lasted as long as it took him to be aware of it and then it vanished and he was back in ’now.’”
Derek also reported that in the 1980’s, he and his wife were on a driving holiday in the North York Moors in England. They went to a tiny coastal village called Staithes, which had a steep winding and narrowing road down to the harbor, with the entrance to the houses and narrow footway at a higher level of three or four feet.
“We parked at the top of the village, hamlet really, where the tourist buses and cars had to stop and made our way down on foot. What I remember is a brilliantly sunny day with lots of other people around, but as we made our way down, it just suddenly seemed as if no one else were there but my wife and me. An old woman appeared on the footway opposite us. It became cooler and duller. She asked, in what seemed to me an old-fashioned and very polite way, what year it was.
Now lots of old people get confused and it could have been that, but what I remember vividly is her black clothes – handmade, rough and with hand-sewn buttons – really big compared with modern ones. Her shoes were very old fashioned with much higher and chunkier heels than you’d see an older person wearing nowadays. In the time it took me to turn to my wife and say, ’Did you see that?’ she was gone. The sun was back and so were all the people. My wife had also seen the same old woman and felt the same chill.”3
Derek’s experience seems strikingly similar to traditional ghost stories. Many ghost sightings are readily explained as individuals who appear out of their normal location or time; but often the ghost also seems to change the surroundings of the witness, giving the impression of a time slip. What is open to question is whether these are glimpses into another time or does the witness or the ghost actually travel in time? Perhaps it is simply different sides of the same coin.
Martin Jeffrey, co-editor with Louise Jeffrey of the website www.mysterymag.com, speculates that time slips can be recreated or induced using a,
“trigger factor,” which “…occurs when one is interested in his surroundings but is not concentrating on them; a slip occurs at a precise place and moment and the witness is thrust seemingly into another time.”
Jeffrey cites the case of Alice Pollock, who at Leeds Castle in Kent,
“experienced what could be called a ’classic’ time slip. Alice was experimenting in Henry VIII’s rooms by touching objects in an attempt to experience events from another time. After a period of receiving no impressions whatsoever, the room suddenly changed. It lost its modern, comfortable appearance to become cold and bare. The carpet had disappeared and there were now logs burning on the fire. A tall woman in a white dress was walking up and down the room; her face seemed to be in deep concentration. Not long after, the room returned to its original state.
Later research found that the rooms had been the prison of Queen Joan of Navarre, Henry V’s stepmother, who had been accused of witchcraft by her husband.”4
It could be that the witness triggers time slips, whether they blank their mind at a precise moment and the slip occurs, or the witness touches something that holds the memory of a previous time.
“The simplest explanation is probably the psychometric hypothesis,” noted Colin Wilson and John Grant in The Directory of Possibilities. “In the mid-nineteenth century, Dr. Joseph Rodes Buchanan of the Covington Medical Institute performed experiments that convinced him that certain of his students could hold letters in their hands and accurately describe the character of the writer. He became convinced that all objects carry their ’history’ photographed in them.
Buchanan wrote: ’The past is entombed in the present. The discoveries of psychometry will enable us to explore the history of Man as those of geology enable us to explore the history of Earth.’ Clearly, psychometry may be seen as a form of time slip.”
CLASSIC TIME SLIPS
The classic of time slip tales occurred in August 1901, when two Englishwomen on holiday, Annie Moberly, Principal of St. Hugh’s College in Oxford and Dr. Eleanor Frances Jourdain, visited Paris. After a short stay in the capital, they went on to Versailles.
After visiting the palace they began searching for the Petit Trianon but became lost. As they wandered the grounds, both women began to feel strange, as if a heavy mood was oppressing their spirits. Two men dressed in “long greyish-green coats with small three-cornered hats” suddenly appeared and directed the women to the Petit Trianon. They strolled up to an isolated cottage where a woman and a 12- or 13-year-old girl were standing at the doorway, both wearing white kerchiefs fastened under their bodices.
The woman was standing at the top of the steps, holding a jug and leaning slightly forwards, while the girl stood beneath her, looking up at her and stretching out her empty hands.
“She might have been just going to take the jug or have just given it up I remember that both seemed to pause for an instant, as in a motion picture,” Dr. Jourdain would later write.
The two Oxford ladies went on their way and soon reached a pavilion that stood in the middle of an enclosure. The place had an unusual air about it and the atmosphere was depressing and unpleasant. A man was sitting outside the pavilion, his face repulsively disfigured by smallpox, wearing a coat and a straw hat. He seemed not to notice the two women; at any rate, he paid no attention to them.
The Englishwomen walked on in silence and after a while reached a small country house with shuttered windows and terraces on either side. A lady was sitting on the lawn with her back to the house. She held a large sheet of paper or cardboard in her hand and seemed to be working at or looking at a drawing. She wore a summer dress with a long bodice and a very full, apparently short skirt, which was extremely unusual. She had a pale green fichu or kerchief draped around her shoulders, and a large white hat covered her fair hair.
At the end of the terraces was a second house. As the two women drew near, a door suddenly flew open and slammed shut again. A young man with the demeanor of a servant, but not wearing livery, came out. As the two Englishwomen thought they had trespassed on private property, they followed the man toward the Petit Trianon. Quite unexpectedly, from one moment to the next, they found themselves in the middle of a crowd–apparently a wedding party–all dressed in the fashions of 1901.
On their return to England, Annie Moberly and Eleanor Jourdain discussed their trip and began to wonder about their experiences at the Petit Trianon. The two began to wonder if they had somehow seen the ghost of Marie Antoinette, or rather, if they had somehow telepathically entered into one of the Queen’s memories left behind in that location. As if to confirm their suspicion, Moberly came across a picture of Marie Antoinette drawn by the artist Wertmüller. To her astonishment it depicted the same sketching woman she had seen near the Petit Trianon. Even the clothes were the same.
Intrigued by the growing mystery, Jourdain returned to Versailles in January 1902 and discovered that she was unable to retrace their earlier steps. The grounds seemed mysteriously altered. She then learned that on October 5, 1789 Marie Antoinette had been sitting at the Petit Trianon when she first learned that a mob from Paris was marching towards the palace gates.
Jourdain and Moberly decided that Marie Antoinette’s memory of this terrifying moment must have somehow lingered and persisted through the years, and it was into this memory that they had inadvertently stumbled. 5
NATURES TIME MACHINE
What can be concluded then from these anecdotal tales? Did these people actually travel, albeit briefly, into the past to glimpse scenes that once were? Or were they caught up in a form of haunting where, like an old movie, they saw a scene that had somehow been implanted in a location and allowed to “play back” again for those sensitive enough to pick up the lingering impressions?
However, if time slips are a form of haunting, what explanation can be offered to the experience of a Mr. Squirrel, who in 1973 went into a stationer’s shop in Great Yarmouth to buy some envelopes. He was served by a woman in Edwardian dress and bought three dozen envelopes for a shilling. He noticed that the building was extremely silent — there was no traffic noise.
On visiting the shop three weeks later, he found it completely changed and modernized; the assistant, an elderly lady, denied that there had been any other assistant in the shop the previous week. Even though the envelopes disintegrated quickly, Mr. Squirrel was able to track down the manufacturers, who said that such envelopes had ceased to be manufactured fifteen years before. 6
How can a haunting produce such physical evidence?
Time slips are “often accompanied by feelings of depression, eeriness and a marked sense of silence, deeper than normally experienced,” posits author Andrew MacKenzie in his book Adventures in Time: Encounters With the Past, drawing this conclusion based on the Versailles time slip accounts as well as his own interviews with people who have experienced the phenomenon.
“It is interesting to note that on August 10, 1901, the day of Annie Moberly and Eleanor Jourdain’s experience, electrical storms were recorded over Europe and the atmosphere was heavy with electricity. Could this have led to an alteration in the local temporal field around Versailles?”
Perhaps there is a natural phenomenon that under the right conditions and location can produce briefly a doorway to another time and place. Even though this may sound outrageous, this natural “time machine” could show that modern concepts and perceptions of time need to be seriously reconsidered. It may be that the past and even the future might be closer then thought with current scientific theories.
With the right frame of mind and the right natural conditions, the barriers of time and space that have traditionally kept mankind locked into place may finally be broken, allowing the mysteries of the world and the universe to be finally revealed.
Endnotes:
1 http://www.bbc.co.uk/dna/h2g2/alabaster/A684821 2 E-mailed to author3 E-mailed to author4 www.mysterymag.com5 An adventure (London, 1911), The Ghosts of the Trianon, Edited by Michael H. Coleman, Published 1988 by Aquarian6 The Directory of Possibilities, edited by Colin Wilson and John Grant, published 1981 by Webb & Bower
by Free Spirit
July 02, 2014
from KeysToImmortality Website
Spanish version
The Illusion of 3D Linear Space-Time – The Truth about Time
Time is in essence a grand illusion that has taken a hold of our consciousness and conditioned our reality to believe in it, thus we then become enslaved by the illusion and suffer the karmas associated with it.
Bound to the ticking of the clock, we slowly but surely create our own death. The entire infrastructure of the 3rd dimension is built around time (scheduling, dates, sequencing and chronological order) and thus reinforces the illusion..
Understanding Time can also open up dimensional pathways to other worlds/times/realities that serve as a bypass for the inevitable collapse scenarios.
Time travel – a possible alternative to post-industrial collapse.
In the Singularity of Source, there is no time – only an Infinitely Conscious Presence of Being that exists in all forms and all spaces at once. As one comes to recognize Source, one is freed from the bonds of time and all karmic causality is destroyed.
In the Immortal Timeless Presence of Source – the past (or the future!) have no power and one becomes a Karma Immune Being. This is an extremely powerful vibratory state to exist in and by residing here one is free from ALL conditionings, delusions, illusions and cycles of time.
Karma no longer has power over one because the Law of Cause and Effect needs a temporal (time) bubble to exist within.
Outside of time, nothing can precede anything or condition any future moment, for there is no future to affect. In the same vein, the energy of the past peels away from one’s being and becomes nothing.
The causal links between the past and the present are severed, thus no karma can possibly ripen or even exist in the Timeless State. As for the redemption and forgiveness of karma, the embodiment of Source Presence is the most powerful – and ultimately the only real mechanism behind karmic cleansing.
Source was and always is free from karma. Karma is simply a denser shroud that cloaks our Original Innocence. Timelessness is inherently innocent for there is no time in which anything different can stain it.
For many people, it is absurd to believe that time is an illusion, for it appears to be reflected everywhere and appears to exist as a fundamental, inherent and unchangeable condition of this dimension. Thus we appear to be trapped within it and there seems no mechanism for transcending time.
It is very important for readers to understand what time is.
In essence, it is nothing other than a mental construct created by the ego-mind to separate out perceptions and events into an order, so that the sensations arising from them can be assimilated and made sense of.
Truth – Beings in the 3rd dimension can only ever perceive one thing at a time
It may appear we can perceive many things in the linear dimension at once, but in reality, the linear mind can only handle one perception at a time – no matter how ‘bunched up’ these perceptions seem.
The mind in the 3rd dimension cannot perceive directly the Timeless Singularity of Source, for the mind exists within duality, and within duality all things appear distinctly separate.
In order to perceive all of these distinctively separate phenomena, the mind projects a ‘holding space’ for these phenomena called space-time. The space aspect creates a medium for distinguishing everything and providing a contrast between one phenomenon (object, sound, smell or any other kind of sensation) and another.
3-dimensional space has no inherent reality of its own and cannot be perceived to exist as a ‘stand-alone’ phenomenon. It always requires some kind of phenomena so as to be distinguishable. The construct of space allows the mind to see where one form ends and another begins.
However, once one penetrates the realms of the subatomic – there is simply a sea of superstrings that are not at all separately grouped, in relation to the 3D objects that contain them.
Higher Dimensional Reality
Superstrings and Brane Bubbles
There is no boundary between the superstrings in me and the superstrings outside of me. The illusory sense of boundary that exists within 3D is transcended.
Readers can reflect on this.
Where does the ‘me’ start and the ‘me’ end?
What is the ‘me’?
Where is the ‘me’?
One can reflect deeply and find that space is simply a mental vacuum – a mental space – where mental projections can be inserted into.
Because the sensations that the mind perceives are externalized, this mental space then appears to exist outside of oneself and have a distinct reality of its own. Belief in its inherent reality then creates the illusion of the 3rd dimensional spatial matrix.
The illusion of space then gives rise to the notion of distance, which is nothing other than a mirroring of our own separation from Source.
This illusion was spawned so early in our formative years that we have come to forget there is any other way of perceiving reality. The transcendence of the illusion of distance (a concept created by the mind) results in the ability to bi-locate and teleport.
As the energies from the Central Sun reach their zenith, this will then facilitate bodily teleportation and the subsequent Ascension as one is able to stand outside of the limitations of the 3D matrix of space-time.
One can also enter the microcosm in this state.
Once I was able to see into the space between the outside and the inside surface of a quark as described here:
These superstrings are in everything and have no size.
They constantly are seen to rotate, flicker in and out of existence, and birth new strings that break away and form new superstring structures elsewhere. They emanate an extremely powerful golden light.
The surfaces of individual quarks appear as shiny rainbow translucent membranes. One’s consciousness can zoom in to see billions of superstrings creating an infinitely intricate fractal pattern that exists between the inside and the outside of the quark – collapsing that particular duality.
In the space between the perceived “outside and inside” of a quark, a hundred billion or so superstrings intersect that minute space.
The inside surface of a quark appears to move independently of the outside surface creating hyper-dimensional torsion that allows for the formation of wormholes allowing the superstrings to pervade the entire volume of this inner quark-escape.
The superstrings sometimes unravel and create the impression of golden highways where trillions of encoded symbols rush down their lengths. It is possible to enter one of the symbols itself and enter another level of quantum reality where particles looking like plasma balls fire out rainbow vibrations in all directions.
These plasma balls all appear to emerge from the whiteness and all of them appear to be intrinsically intelligent sub-quark light beings.
The whiteness itself appears as a cylindrical glowing tube that glows almost brightly enough to obscure the “interior”.
In places the light reveals particles within that appear to be shaped like a torus (dough-nut shape). They sparkle, glisten and fold in upon themselves in almost inconceivable ways to give the impression of a continuous mutation of form. At this level we are seeing dimensions several billion times smaller than the thickness of the external membrane of a quark.
The energy is intense here, and rainbow bolts of lightning appear to be projected out of the torus structures. The arrow of time appears to point in all directions at once and events within some pockets of this reality appear to flow in retrograde.
There is enough energy buried in one of these torus structures to provide all the power humanity would ever need. All of the energy of the entire Universe flows through each of these structures and thus they are infinite resources of energy.
Time is inherently bound up with the illusion of the spatial matrix, for it is nothing other than a supplementary construct created by the mind to prevent ‘the box’ filling up with everything at once!
Everything can and does happen at once within Singularity Consciousness.
Time is another form of contrast that orders perceptions of all kinds of sensual phenomena into a manageable stream, that can then be analyzed by the mind. Linear time is an endless, incomplete continuum that always requires another perception in order for its existence to be continued.
Thus the mind can never be in the Presence and instead continues to habitually grasp for the next experience.
There is never a completeness of experience, for it is always open ended. One perception leads to another – and another – and so the illusion continues indefinitely. In the awareness of the higher dimensions there is a deeper completeness.
Linear time then becomes a circle and transcends its own illusion!
In this ‘completion of the circle’ one sees oneself as Source Presence that does not require a location in space-time to exist. In the stepping out of the Presence of Source the wheels of time turn once again!
Physical transmutation of the body (Ascension work) causes our being to move into alternate temporal realities where time appears to run at a much faster rate.
This causes all of our karmic processes to speed up and accounts for the experiences of those undergoing all kinds of emotional and spiritual processing in a much shorter time than the conventional norm.
The apparent appearance of accelerated time is due to the contrast between the timeless dimensions and this linear dimension. Our own perceptions of time are influenced by the powerful energies of the higher planes and the stream of higher vibrating energies creates the sensation of altered temporal realities. When this is understood time is then seen to slow down and dilate.
This temporal dilation can allow for some remarkable experiences, such as the ability to teleport 2.4 billion light years or so across space in the blink of an eye (read Keys to Immortality).
Intrepid dimensional travellers breaking the time barrier
may find themselves seeing alien worlds in other galaxies.
There are no limits beyond the constraints of time and distance and one then becomes an embodied intergalactic traveler, able to traverse the Universe at will.
Huge networks of wormholes within 10th dimensional superstrings open up billions of galaxies that can be explored by the higher-dimensional Timeless self. It is a truly mind-blowing experience to be presented with such an astonishing expansiveness of reality.
However, that is the norm in the Universe, and it is only the belief in the limitations of the linear world that we find ourselves confined to one planet amongst a dying species whilst the Cosmos surrounds us waiting to be explored.
by Arjun Walia
February 18, 2016
from Collective-Evolution Website
Time: it’s no doubt a confusing topic, and it gets even more confusing the more we try to unearth its secrets.
Physicists have been examining the workings of time for decades, and the results published about it are mind-altering to contemplate, to say the least, and show that time might not exist as we think it does.
A new paper titled “Time Crystals from Minimum Time Uncertainty” that was recently revised and re-published in The European Physical Journal marks just one example of the astonishing research being conducted on this subject.
In it, the researchers have proposed that the shortest physically meaningful length of time might really be multiple orders of magnitude longer than Planck time.
Planck time refers to the time required for light to travel, in a vacuum, which would be a distance of 1 Planck length. The unit is named after Max Planck, who was the first to propose the theory.
Nur Faisal from the University of Waterloo, one of the researchers involved in the study, told phys.org that it might be possible for the minimum time scale in the universe to actually be much larger than Planck time.
He also said that this can be,
“directly tested experimentally.”
No experiment has ever come close to examining Planck time directly because it is so short. Nevertheless, as phys.org points out, there is a good amount of theoretical support for the existence of Planck time.
Faisal explains:
“In our paper, we have proposed that time is discrete in nature, and we have also suggested ways to experimentally test this proposal.”
So, how do they figure that time might be much larger than Planck time?
They measured the rate of spontaneous emission of a hydrogen atom:
The modified quantum mechanical equation predicts a slightly different rate of spontaneous emission than that predicted by the unmodified equation, within a range of uncertainty.
The proposed effects may also be observable in the decay rates of particles and of unstable nuclei.
The researchers also mention that their findings could change the basic equations of quantum mechanics, and would modify the very definition of time that’s understood today.
The Illusion of Reality
According to the rules of quantum mechanics, our observations, and as some scientists like to call them, ‘factors associated with consciousness,’ influence the universe at the most fundamental levels.
When physicists look at reality at the smallest scales, it becomes clear that an atom’s behavior is dependant on the physicist’s observations.
“I regard consciousness as fundamental. I regard matter as derivative from consciousness. We cannot get behind consciousness. Everything that we talk about, everything that we regard as existing, postulates consciousness.”
Max Planck
As per this experiment, researchers noted that our perception of time as something that is continuously flowing is just an illusion.
Faizal explains:
The physical universe is really like a movie/motion picture, in which a series of still images shown on a screen creates the illusion of moving images.
Thus, if this view is taken seriously, then our conscious precipitation of physical reality based on continuous motion becomes an illusion produced by a discrete underlying mathematical structure. This proposal makes reality platonic in nature.
However, unlike other theories of platonic idealism, our proposal can be experimentally tested and not just be argued for philosophically.
Faizal is referring to Plato‘s idea that true reality exists independent of our senses.
Perhaps the true makeup of what we perceive to be reality is beyond our ability to perceive?
The Delayed Choice/Quantum Eraser Experiment
The delayed choice experiment illustrates how what happens in the present can change what happens(ed) in the past.
It also shows,
how time can go backwards
how cause and effect can be reverted
how the future caused the past
To understand the delayed choice experiment, you have to understand the quantum double slit experiment, which is used to show how factors associated with consciousness create different behaviors in an atom, as mentioned earlier.
In this experiment, tiny bits of matter (photons, electrons, or any atomic-sized object) are shot towards a screen that has two slits in it.
On the other side of the screen, a high tech video camera records where each photon lands. When scientists close one slit, the camera will show us an expected pattern, as seen in the video below.
But when both slits are opened, an “interference pattern” emerges – they begin to act like waves.
This doesn’t mean that atomic objects are observed as a wave (even though it recently has been observed as a wave), but rather that each photon individually goes through both slits at the same time and interferes with itself, but it also goes through one slit, and it goes through the other.
Furthermore, it goes through neither of them.
The single piece of matter becomes a “wave” of potentials, expressing itself in the form of multiple possibilities, and this is why we get the interference pattern.
How can a single piece of matter exist and express itself in multiple states, without any physical properties, until it is “measured” or “observed”?
Furthermore, how does it choose which path, out of multiple possibilities, it will take?
Then, when an “observer” decides to measure and look at which slit the piece of matter goes through, the “wave” of potential paths collapses into one single path.
The particle goes from becoming, again, a “wave” of potentials into one particle taking a single route. It’s as if the particle knows it’s being watched.
The observer has some sort of effect on the behavior of the particle.
Multiple experiments have found that factors associated with consciousness “significantly” correlated in predicted ways with perturbations in the double slit interference pattern. (source)
You can view a visual demonstration/explanation of the double slit experiment here.
This quantum uncertainty is defined as the ability,
“according to the quantum mechanic laws that govern subatomic affairs, of a particle like an electron to exist in a murky state of possibility – to be anywhere, everywhere or nowhere at all – until clicked into substantiality by a laboratory detector or an eyeball.”
(
New York Times)
According to physicist Andrew Truscott, lead researcher from a study (Wheeler’s Delayed-Choice Gedanken Experiment with a Single Atom) published by the Australian National University, the experiment suggests that,
“reality does not exist unless we are looking at it.”
It suggests that we are living in a holographic-type of universe. (source)
Now…
So, how is all of this information relevant to the concept of time?
Just as the double slit experiment illustrates how factors associated with consciousness collapse the quantum wave function (a piece of matter existing in multiple potential states) into a single piece of matter with defined physical properties (no longer a wave, all those potential states collapsed into one), the delayed choice experiment illustrates how what happens in the present can change what happens(ed) in the past.
It also shows how time can go backwards, how cause and effect can be reversed, and how the future caused the past.
Like the quantum double slit experiment, the delayed choice/quantum eraser has been demonstrated and repeated time and time again.
For example, Physicists at The Australian National University (ANU) have conducted John Wheeler’s delayed-choice thought experiment; their findings were recently published in the journal Nature Physics. (Wheeler’s Delayed-Choice Gedanken Experiment with a Single Atom)
In 2007 (Science 315, 966, 2007), scientists in France shot photons into an apparatus and showed that their actions could retroactively change something which had already happened.
Asher Peres, a pioneer in quantum information theory, elaborates:
If we attempt to attribute an objective meaning to the quantum state of a single system, curious paradoxes appear:
quantum effects mimic not only instantaneous action-at-a-distance, but also, as seen here, influence of future actions on past events, even after these events have been irrevocably recorded.
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This idea was first brought to the forefront by John Wheeler in 1978, which is why I am going to end this article with his explanation of the delayed choice experiment.
He believed that this experiment was best explained on a cosmic scale.
Cosmic Scale Explanation
He asks us to imagine a star emitting a photon billions of years ago, heading in the direction of planet Earth.
In between, there is a galaxy. As a result of what’s known as “gravitational lensing,” the light will have to bend around the galaxy in order to reach Earth, so it has to take one of two paths: go left or go right.
Billions of years later, if one decides to set up an apparatus to “catch” the photon, the resulting pattern would be (as explained above in the double slit experiment) an interference pattern.
This demonstrates that the photon took one way, and it took the other way.
One could also choose to “peek” at the incoming photon, setting up a telescope on each side of the galaxy to determine which side the photon took to reach Earth. The very act of measuring or “watching” which way the photon comes in means it can only come in from one side.
The pattern will no longer be an interference pattern representing multiple possibilities, but a single clump pattern showing “one” way.
What does this mean? It means how we choose to measure “now” affects what direction the photon took billions of years ago. Our choice in the present moment affected what had already happened in the past…
This makes absolutely no sense, which is a common problem when it comes to quantum physics. Regardless of our ability make sense of it, however, it is very real.
This experiment also suggests that quantum entanglement (which has also been verified; read more about that here) exists regardless of time – meaning two bits of matter can actually be entangled, again, in time.
Time, both as we measure it and understand it, doesn’t really exist…
