[quote]Vegita wrote:
I’m not trying to argue it’s validity, I just wanted to throw out a possibility where the future could effect the past. At least from the observers point of view. [/quote]
Well, if you like that, I think you would like Wheeler-Feynman advanced and retarded waves, previously mentioned.
Briefly, many interpret quantum theory in terms of a photon being emitted from an atom (or otherwise) and a wave function goes out with different probabilities of the photon being found in any location, and at some point the wave function is collapsed thanks to a conscious observer.
In this interpretation nothing about it is affected until that collapse, except for weird stuff such as whether it passed through one or two slits at the same time depending on whether a conscious observer makes a measurement of that, which could be after the fact.
It needs to be emphasized that this is an interpretation rather than what the math says or what can be proven by experiment. (Obviously, it’s a tautology that conscious observers only observe that which is observed by conscious observers, so the fact that that is so proves nothing.)
Now, an interesting thing is that “to a photon” (not that a photon is conscious) time of arrival is the same instant as time of departure, as at the speed of light zero time passes regardless of the distance traveled. In other words, “to the photon,” light from the Andromeda galaxy that strikes your eye at night while stargazing does so at the same instant as it departed, rather than one event being “past” and the other being “future.”
In the Wheeler-Feynman view of it, the emitter sends out an “offer” wave (actually, both an advanced wave and a retarded wave, extending into what we would call the past and future). And the receiver – regardless of possibly being a billion light years away and doing so at what we would call a billion years in the future – sends out an acceptance wave which reaches the emitter. (Regardless that to our perspective the emitter is a billion years in the receiver’s past.)
Due to wave interference, the only remaining pathway is the photon’s path from the emitter to the receiver. Everything else cancels.
The equations involved are exactly the same as usual. It is not a different theory, but a different interpretation of the same equations.
This interpretation does not require an observer to collapse wave functions (though the tautology remains true that an observer can know only of things that are observed.)
And it has the feature you like (or I do, anyway) of the future being an integral part of or at least participant in what occurs.
