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Scientists have spotted a mysterious uptick in the appearance of unexplained patches of white water in the shallow waters off the coast of the Bahamas, reports a new study based on satellite observations.

For almost a century, people have observed these so-called “whiting” events, which typically cover an area equivalent to a few hundred football fields, but nobody knows the exact cause of this phenomenon. Samples show that the discoloration is caused by fine-grained calcium carbonate that floats over the Bahama Banks, which are carbonate structures that surround the archipelago, but it’s not clear why the grain clouds sporadically appear in the ocean.

To shed light on this enigma, researchers from the University of South Florida compiled the longest and most detailed space-down view of the Bahama Bank whiting events using observations captured by NASA’s Aqua satellite between 2003 and 2020.

The team also trained a machine learning tool to analyze the images, an approach that revealed a “mysterious increase” in whiting events over the past decade, which peaked in 2015, as well as seasonal patterns in these discolorations, according to a recent study in the journal Remote Sensing of Environment.

“In a changing climate with decreased pH (i.e., ocean acidification) and increased temperature, one would expect slow, continuous change in whiting events,” said Chuanmin Hu, an oceanographer at the University of South Florida who co-authored the study, in an email to Motherboard.

“The former would lead to decreased events while the latter would lead to increased events, at least according to theory,” he added. “However, what we observed was truly a surprise with a 10-year episode of increased whiting events.”

In addition to spotting these long-term patterns, the team found a large range of sizes and timeframes for the whiting events. Some patches vanished after a few days, while others stuck around for as long as three months. And while the smallest events cover a mere fraction of a square mile, the white discoloration regularly extended across more than 150 square miles from 2014 to 2015, an area roughly equivalent to the city of Detroit, Michigan.

Those huge white patches represented the zenith of an overall increase in the total area of the whiting events that occurred from 2003 to 2015. After 2015, the occurrence of such large patches gradually tapered off, reaching an average size of about 10 square miles by 2020.

The seasonal and decadal patterns revealed by the study are certainly tantalizing, but they haven’t yet unlocked the origin of the events. Though scientists have speculated that the phenomenon could be related to sporadic flourishing of microorganisms in the ocean, or to currents that drag calcium carbonate particles to the surface, these milky splashes in the Bahamas are still an unsolved riddle, at least for now.

“More field work is required to continuously monitor the ocean properties and processes as well as whiting events in order to have a better understanding,” Hu concluded.

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Scientists have proposed that dark matter, an unidentified cosmic material that is considered one of the biggest mysteries in science, was forged in a second “Dark Big Bang” that occurred within one month of the birth of our universe, according to a recent study.

This wild new “alternate cosmology” could account for some of the most perplexing riddles about dark matter, which is about five times more abundant than the regular visible matter that makes up stars and planets, yet has still evaded direct detection. 

Scientists believe that dark matter exists because we can see its gravitational effects on regular matter; for instance, galaxies are held together by dense clumps of dark matter called halos. But though its ghostly influence can be indirectly observed, attempts to actually capture a dark matter particle here on Earth have consistently failed, suggesting that this material exists in some kind of shadow realm that has only the most tenuous gravitational link with our own visible universe.

Katherine Freese and Martin Wolfgang Winkler, two physicists at the University of Texas at Austin, have now proposed that dark matter is such a bizarre outlier because it has a completely different genesis than the rest of the universe. 

Our existing model of the cosmos assumes that both regular and dark matter were born in the Big Bang, a sudden moment of extreme inflation that is considered to be the start gun of the universe. Freese and Winkler upend this idea by suggesting that dark matter could be formed in a second “Dark Big Bang” that occurred within a month of the first Big Bang. What’s more, the pair propose that their model could produce a number of “exciting experimental signatures” that would be detectable to existing and future instruments, hinting that “a direct test of the Dark Big Bang origin of the dark matter could become feasible,” according to a recent study published on the preprint server arxiv.

“According to the cosmological standard model, the very early Universe went through an epoch of inflation—a rapid expansion of space driven by vacuum energy,” Freese and Winkler said in their study, which has not yet been peer-reviewed. “The origins of matter and radiation lie in the Hot Big Bang which terminates inflation and releases the vacuum energy into a hot plasma of particles. The latter contains the photons, leptons and quarks of our visible Universe, and, in the standard picture, also the dark matter.”

“However, there is no genuine reason for a common origin of visible and dark matter beyond simplicity,” the team continued. “Furthermore—despite excessive experimental searches over decades—no direct non-gravitational interactions between visible and dark matter have been detected. In this light, we will present an alternative cosmological scenario in which the visible and the dark (matter) sector are completely decoupled (other than through gravity). The Hot Big Bang only induces visible radiation and matter, but no dark matter at all.” 

It’s a mind-boggling new interpretation of our cosmic origins, but the researchers said the idea of a Dark Big Bang does not appear to violate the constraints associated with models of early cosmic structure formation, provided that dark matter emerged within a few weeks of the birth of the universe.

There are a number of possible scenarios that might lead to this one-two punch at the beginning of time, but Freese and Winkler focus on what’s known as “a first-order phase transition” that led to the creation of dark matter. Essentially, in addition to producing the seeds of regular matter, the original Big Bang generated a dark quantum field that didn’t immediately decay. As the days rolled by in the universe’s infancy, regular matter cooled into atoms, a process known as Big Bang nucleosynthesis (BBN). At some point around the point of BBN, the dark quantum field did finally decay and transform its state, sparking the Dark Big Bang that created dark matter.  

One of the most exciting implications of a Dark Big Bang is that it would leave traces that could be potentially detectable to modern instruments. For instance, an event of this scale would probably produce gravitational waves, which are ripples in spacetime, that might be observable in observations of ultra-dense stars known as pulsars. Indeed, Freese and Winkler suggest that a project known as the International Pulsar Timing Array (IPTA) may have already spotted potential evidence for a Dark Big Bang.

“The Dark Big Bang phase transition generates strong gravitational radiation,” the team said in their study. “[W]e investigated the sensitivity of ongoing and upcoming pulsar timing array experiments to the gravitational wave signal from the Dark Big Bang. We found that already the ongoing IPTA run (which combines several individual PTA experiments) has an exciting discovery potential for Dark Big Bangs which occur around or after BBN.” 

“Intriguingly, a tentative gravitational wave signal by the NANOGrav experiment (included in the IPTA network) could already be interpreted as the first sign of the Dark Big Bang,” the researchers added.

Future instruments, such as the enormous Square Kilometer Array, could provide even more sensitivity to the search for signs of this speculative origin of dark matter. At this point, it’s hard to predict whether this unusual explanation for dark matter might ever be backed up by hard evidence, but the new study provides a tantalizing roadmap to seek the answer to one of science’s most intractable riddles.

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For decades, a major cosmic mystery has puzzled scientists: Why is the universe’s expansion accelerating, rather than slowing down due to gravity? The search for an answer has led groups all over the world to look for an invisible force dubbed dark energy that could explain this observation. Now, new research may have finally given us just the breakthrough we’ve been waiting for. 

A pair of new papers published by a team of 17 international scientists offers the first observational evidence of a source for dark energy. According to the team, after poring over data covering 9 billion years of cosmic evolution, the most likely answer is black holes—but not how you probably understand them. 

“If the theory holds, then this is going to revolutionize the whole of cosmology, because at last we’ve got a solution for the origin of dark energy that’s been perplexing cosmologists and theoretical physicists for more than 20 years,” study co-author Chris Pearson, from RAL Space in the UK, said in a statement.

The key to the discovery was tracking the rate of black hole growth relative to their position in the history of the universe. The researchers found that black holes embedded in ancient galaxies that formed in the early universe—which are now dead, and thus don’t form new material to feed their black holes—were more massive than could be explained by the traditional methods of growth, which are eating stars and merging with other black holes. The researchers also found that the black holes were getting more massive in relative lockstep with the expansion of the universe. This, the researchers wrote, is known as “cosmological coupling.”

“We thus propose that stellar remnant black holes are the astrophysical origin of dark energy,” the authors wrote in the study. 

This conclusion requires us to think of black holes a little differently than we normally might. Typically, black holes are envisioned as containing a singularity, where even gravity breaks down. What this idea assumes is that instead of a singularity, black hole interiors contain vacuum energy. Vacuum energy stems from the idea that, rather than a vacuum being a total void, it actually has a complex structure on the quantum scale. 

As an American Astronomical Society blog on the new research explains: “Traditional singularity-containing black holes would have a coupling strength of 0, while vacuum-energy black holes would have a coupling strength of 3. Ultimately, the team found the coupling strength to be around 3.11, and they ruled out the possibility of zero coupling at 99.98% confidence.”

While this discovery is certainly mind-blowing, it actually fits neatly into existing models of the universe. It means there is no need to conceive of some external force causing the universe to expand, and it does away with the requirement that black holes contain singularities, which remain a thorny problem in physics. 

“We’re really saying two things at once: that there’s evidence the typical black hole solutions don’t work for you on a long, long timescale, and we have the first proposed astrophysical source for dark energy,” first author Duncan Farrah from the University of Hawai`i, which led the research, said. 

“What that means, though, is not that other people haven’t proposed sources for dark energy, but this is the first observational paper where we’re not adding anything new to the Universe as a source for dark energy: black holes in Einstein’s theory of gravity are the dark energy.”

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Have you ever found yourself in a self-imposed jam and thought, “Well, if it isn’t the consequences of my own actions”? It’s a common refrain that exposes a deeper truth about the way we humans understand time and causality. Our actions in the past are correlated to our experience of the future, whether that’s a good outcome, like acing a test because you prepared, or a bad one, like waking up with a killer hangover.

But what if this forward causality could somehow be reversed in time, allowing actions in the future to influence outcomes in the past? This mind-bending idea, known as retrocausality, may seem like science fiction grist at first glance, but it is starting to gain real traction among physicists and philosophers, among other researchers, as a possible solution to some of the most intractable riddles underlying our reality.

In other words, people are becoming increasingly “retro-curious,” said Kenneth Wharton, a professor of physics at San Jose State University who has published research about retrocausality, in a call with Motherboard. Even though it may feel verboten to consider a future that affects the past, Wharton and others think it could account for some of the strange phenomena observed in quantum physics, which exists on the tiny scale of atoms.

“We have instincts about all sorts of things, and some are stronger than others,” said Wharton, who recently co-authored an article about retrocausality with Huw Price, a distinguished professor emeritus at the University of Bonn and an emeritus fellow of Trinity College, Cambridge.

“I’ve found our instincts of time and causation are our deepest, strongest instincts that physicists and philosophers—and humans—are loath to give up,” he added.

Scientists, including Price, have speculated about the possibility that the future might influence the past for decades, but the renewed curiosity about retrocausality is driven by more recent findings about quantum mechanics.

Unlike the familiar macroscopic world that we inhabit, which is governed by classical physics, the quantum realm allows for inexplicably trippy phenomena. Particles at these scales can breeze right through seemingly impassable barriers, a trick called quantum tunneling, or they can occupy many different states simultaneously, known as superposition.

The properties of quantum objects can also somehow become synced up together even if they are located light years apart. This so-called “quantum entanglement” was famously described by Albert Einstein as “spooky action at a distance,” and experimental research into it just earned the 2022 Nobel Prize in Physics.

Quantum entanglement flouts a lot of our assumptions about the universe, prompting scientists to wonder which of our treasured darlings in physics must be killed to account for it. For some, it’s the idea of “locality,” which essentially means that objects should not be able to interact at great distances without some kind of physical mediator. Other researchers think that “realism”—the idea that there is some kind of objective bedrock to our existence—should be sacrificed at the altar of entanglement.

Wharton and Price, among many others, are embracing a third option: Retrocausality. In addition to potentially rescuing concepts like locality and realism, retrocausal models also open avenues of exploring a “time-symmetric” view of our universe, in which the laws of physics are the same regardless of whether time runs forward or backward.

“In any model where you had an event in the past correlated with your future choice of setting, that would be retrocausal”

“If you think things should be time-symmetric, there’s an argument to be made that you need some retrocausality to make sense of quantum mechanics in a time-symmetric way,” said Emily Adlam, a postdoctoral associate at Western University’s Rotman Institute of Philosophy who studies retrocausality, in a call with Motherboard. “There’s a bunch of different reasons that have come together to make people interested in this possibility.”

To better understand retrocausality, it’s worth revisiting a common thought experiment featuring characters called Alice and Bob, who each receive a particle from the same source, even though they may be light years apart. After conducting measurements on their particles, Alice and Bob discover that these objects are oddly correlated despite the vast distance between them.

Traditionally, this story—which stems from famous experiments made by physicist John Bell—is interpreted to mean that there are non-local quantum effects that cause the particles to be linked across great distances. However, proponents of retrocausality suggest that the particles display correlations that emerge from their past. In other words, the measurements that Alice and Bob conduct on their particles affect the properties of those particles in the past.

“Instead of having magic non-local connections between these two points, maybe the connection is through the past, and that’s what more of us are interested in these days,” Wharton said.

“In any model where you had an event in the past correlated with your future choice of setting, that would be retrocausal,” he added.

This idea seems so unintuitive because we imagine time as a river, an arrow, or an arrangement of sequential boxes on a calendar. At their core, these paradigms envision cause in the past and effect in the future as a forward flow, but retrocausality raises the prospect that these elements could be reversed. It may seem eerie to our brains, which process events sequentially, but the history of science is also littered with examples of human biases leading to bad conclusions, such as the Earth-centric model of the solar system.

“Obviously, as scientists, one thing that it is very useful to do is write down a law which says, ‘given the situation now, what is the situation going to be next? How will things evolve?’” Adlam said. “From a practical point of view, it makes a lot of sense for scientists to write down time evolution laws, because most of the time what we’re interested in doing with the laws is predicting the future.”

“But that’s a pragmatic consideration,” she continued. “That doesn’t mean that the laws of nature must really work that way. There’s no particular reason why they should be aligned with our practical interests in that sense. So, I think it is important to be cautious to distinguish the form of the laws that scientists like to write down for practical reasons from whatever nature is really doing.”

It’s important to emphasize at this point in time, whatever that means, that retrocausality is not the same as time travel. These models don’t predict that signals or objects—including human beings—could be dispatched to the past, in part because there is no evidence that we are currently being deluged with any such future messages, or messengers.

“You have to be very careful in a retrocausal model because the fact of the matter is, we can’t send signals back in time,” Adlam explained. “It’s important that we can’t, because if we could, then we could produce all sorts of vehicles or paradoxes. You have to make sure your model doesn’t allow that.”

Instead, retrocausal models suggest that there is a mechanism that allows circumstances in the future to correlate with past states. This scenario could remove the threats to locality and realism, according to Wharton and Price, though there’s disagreement among experts about the implications of these models. (For instance, Adlam has published work suggesting that retrocausality doesn’t save locality.)

“I’m heartened that more and more physicists are taking this seriously as an unexplored option”

While there are a range of views about the mechanics and consequences of retrocausal theories, a growing community of researchers think this concept has the potential to answer fundamental questions about the universe.

“Many people in the ‘foundations of physics’ community, both physicists and philosophers, have been interested in the question ‘Why the quantum?’ or ‘Why is the world like quantum mechanics says it is?’” Price said in an email to Motherboard. “That is, they’re trying to understand how quantum mechanics is a natural or inevitable result of simple and plausible principles.”

“I think that if our proposed explanation of entanglement works, then it would be a significant new part of the answer,” he continued. “It would show how the correlations we call ‘entanglement’ arise naturally from a combination of ingredients which are all really more basic than quantum mechanics.”

To that point, perhaps the most monumental quest in physics is the search for the “theory of everything” that would at last explain how the quantum and classical realms manage to coexist despite having completely contradictory laws. A huge number of scientists believe that the key to this endeavor is figuring out how gravity works on a quantum level, but retrocausality could also be part of the explanation, according to researchers who study it.

“The problem facing physics right now is that our two pillars of successful theories don’t talk to each other,” Wharton explained. “One is based in space and time, and one has left space and time aside for this giant quantum wave function.”

“The solution to this, as everyone seems to have agreed without discussing it, is that we’ve got to quantize gravity,” he continued. “That’s the goal. Hardly anyone has said, ‘what if things really are in space and time, and we just have to make sense of quantum theory in space and time’? That will be a whole new way to unify everything that people are not looking into.”

Price agreed that this retrocausality could provide a new means to finally solve “eliminate the tension” between quantum mechanics and classical physics (including special relativity).

“That’s such a huge payoff that I’m always puzzled that retrocausality wasn’t taken more seriously decades ago,” Price said, adding that part of the answer may be that retrocausality has frequently been conflated with another far-out concept called superdeterminism.

“Another possible big payoff is that retrocausality supports the so-called ‘epistemic’ view of the wave function in the usual quantum mechanics description—the idea that it is just an encoding of our incomplete knowledge of the system,” he continued. “That makes it much easier to understand the so-called collapse of the wave function, as a change in information, as folk such as Einstein and Schoedinger thought, in the early days. In this respect, I think it gets rid of some more of the (apparently) non-classical features of quantum mechanics, by saying that they don’t amount to anything physically real.”

To that end, scientists who work on retrocausality will continue to develop new theoretical models that attempt to account for more and more experimental phenomena. Eventually, these concepts could inspire experimental techniques that might provide evidence either for, or against, a future that can influence the past.

“The goal is to come up with a more general model,” Wharton concluded. “Whether or not me, or anyone else, will be successful remains to be seen, but I’m heartened that more and more physicists are taking this seriously as an unexplored option. Maybe we should explore it.”

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Have you ever found yourself in a self-imposed jam and thought, “Well, if it isn’t the consequences of my own actions”? It’s a common refrain that exposes a deeper truth about the way we humans understand time and causality. Our actions in the past are correlated to our experience of the future, whether that’s a good outcome, like acing a test because you prepared, or a bad one, like waking up with a killer hangover. 

But what if this forward causality could somehow be reversed in time, allowing actions in the future to influence outcomes in the past? This mind-bending idea, known as retrocausality, may seem like science fiction grist at first glance, but it is starting to gain real traction among physicists and philosophers, among other researchers, as a possible solution to some of the most intractable riddles underlying our reality.

In other words, people are becoming increasingly “retro-curious,” said Kenneth Wharton, a professor of physics at San Jose State University who has published research about retrocausality, in a call with Motherboard. Even though it may feel verboten to consider a future that affects the past, Wharton and others think it could account for some of the strange phenomena observed in quantum physics, which exists on the tiny scale of atoms. 

“We have instincts about all sorts of things, and some are stronger than others,” said Wharton, who recently co-authored an article about retrocausality with Huw Price, a distinguished professor emeritus at the University of Bonn and an emeritus fellow of Trinity College, Cambridge. 

“I’ve found our instincts of time and causation are our deepest, strongest instincts that physicists and philosophers—and humans—are loath to give up,” he added.

Scientists, including Price, have speculated about the possibility that the future might influence the past for decades, but the renewed curiosity about retrocausality is driven by more recent findings about quantum mechanics. 

Unlike the familiar macroscopic world that we inhabit, which is governed by classical physics, the quantum realm allows for inexplicably trippy phenomena. Particles at these scales can breeze right through seemingly impassable barriers, a trick called quantum tunneling, or they can occupy many different states simultaneously, known as superposition. 

The properties of quantum objects can also somehow become synced up together even if they are located light years apart. This so-called “quantum entanglement” was famously described by Albert Einstein as “spooky action at a distance,” and experimental research into it just earned the 2022 Nobel Prize in Physics.  

Quantum entanglement flouts a lot of our assumptions about the universe, prompting scientists to wonder which of our treasured darlings in physics must be killed to account for it. For some, it’s the idea of “locality,” which essentially means that objects should not be able to interact at great distances without some kind of physical mediator. Other researchers think that “realism”—the idea that there is some kind of objective bedrock to our existence—should be sacrificed at the altar of entanglement. 

Wharton and Price, among many others, are embracing a third option: Retrocausality. In addition to potentially rescuing concepts like locality and realism, retrocausal models also open avenues of exploring a “time-symmetric” view of our universe, in which the laws of physics are the same regardless of whether time runs forward or backward. 

“In any model where you had an event in the past correlated with your future choice of setting, that would be retrocausal”

“If you think things should be time-symmetric, there’s an argument to be made that you need some retrocausality to make sense of quantum mechanics in a time-symmetric way,” said Emily Adlam, a postdoctoral associate at Western University’s Rotman Institute of Philosophy who studies retrocausality, in a call with Motherboard. “There’s a bunch of different reasons that have come together to make people interested in this possibility.”

To better understand retrocausality, it’s worth revisiting a common thought experiment featuring characters called Alice and Bob, who each receive a particle from the same source, even though they may be light years apart. After conducting measurements on their particles, Alice and Bob discover that these objects are oddly correlated despite the vast distance between them. 

Traditionally, this story—which stems from famous experiments made by physicist John Bell—is interpreted to mean that there are non-local quantum effects that cause the particles to be linked across great distances. However, proponents of retrocausality suggest that the particles display correlations that emerge from their past. In other words, the measurements that Alice and Bob conduct on their particles affect the properties of those particles in the past. 

“Instead of having magic non-local connections between these two points, maybe the connection is through the past, and that’s what more of us are interested in these days,” Wharton said. 

“In any model where you had an event in the past correlated with your future choice of setting, that would be retrocausal,” he added.

This idea seems so unintuitive because we imagine time as a river, an arrow, or an arrangement of sequential boxes on a calendar. At their core, these paradigms envision cause in the past and effect in the future as a forward flow, but retrocausality raises the prospect that these elements could be reversed. It may seem eerie to our brains, which process events sequentially, but the history of science is also littered with examples of human biases leading to bad conclusions, such as the Earth-centric model of the solar system.

“Obviously, as scientists, one thing that it is very useful to do is write down a law which says, ‘given the situation now, what is the situation going to be next? How will things evolve?’” Adlam said. “From a practical point of view, it makes a lot of sense for scientists to write down time evolution laws, because most of the time what we’re interested in doing with the laws is predicting the future.” 

“But that’s a pragmatic consideration,” she continued. “That doesn’t mean that the laws of nature must really work that way. There’s no particular reason why they should be aligned with our practical interests in that sense. So, I think it is important to be cautious to distinguish the form of the laws that scientists like to write down for practical reasons from whatever nature is really doing.”

It’s important to emphasize at this point in time, whatever that means, that retrocausality is not the same as time travel. These models don’t predict that signals or objects—including human beings—could be dispatched to the past, in part because there is no evidence that we are currently being deluged with any such future messages, or messengers. 

“You have to be very careful in a retrocausal model because the fact of the matter is, we can’t send signals back in time,” Adlam explained. “It’s important that we can’t, because if we could, then we could produce all sorts of vehicles or paradoxes. You have to make sure your model doesn’t allow that.”

Instead, retrocausal models suggest that there is a mechanism that allows circumstances in the future to correlate with past states. This scenario could remove the threats to locality and realism, according to Wharton and Price, though there’s disagreement among experts about the implications of these models. (For instance, Adlam has published work suggesting that retrocausality doesn’t save locality.) 

“I’m heartened that more and more physicists are taking this seriously as an unexplored option”

While there are a range of views about the mechanics and consequences of retrocausal theories, a growing community of researchers think this concept has the potential to answer fundamental questions about the universe.

“Many people in the ‘foundations of physics’ community, both physicists and philosophers, have been interested in the question ‘Why the quantum?’ or ‘Why is the world like quantum mechanics says it is?’” Price said in an email to Motherboard. “That is, they’re trying to understand how quantum mechanics is a natural or inevitable result of simple and plausible principles.” 

“I think that if our proposed explanation of entanglement works, then it would be a significant new part of the answer,” he continued. “It would show how the correlations we call ‘entanglement’ arise naturally from a combination of ingredients which are all really more basic than quantum mechanics.” 

To that point, perhaps the most monumental quest in physics is the search for the “theory of everything” that would at last explain how the quantum and classical realms manage to coexist despite having completely contradictory laws. A huge number of scientists believe that the key to this endeavor is figuring out how gravity works on a quantum level, but retrocausality could also be part of the explanation, according to researchers who study it.

“The problem facing physics right now is that our two pillars of successful theories don’t talk to each other,” Wharton explained. “One is based in space and time, and one has left space and time aside for this giant quantum wave function.”

“The solution to this, as everyone seems to have agreed without discussing it, is that we’ve got to quantize gravity,” he continued. “That’s the goal. Hardly anyone has said, ‘what if things really are in space and time, and we just have to make sense of quantum theory in space and time’? That will be a whole new way to unify everything that people are not looking into.”

Price agreed that this retrocausality could provide a new means to finally solve “eliminate the tension” between quantum mechanics and classical physics (including special relativity). 

“That’s such a huge payoff that I’m always puzzled that retrocausality wasn’t taken more seriously decades ago,” Price said, adding that part of the answer may be that retrocausality has frequently been conflated with another far-out concept called superdeterminism.

“Another possible big payoff is that retrocausality supports the so-called ‘epistemic’ view of the wave function in the usual quantum mechanics description—the idea that it is just an encoding of our incomplete knowledge of the system,” he continued. “That makes it much easier to understand the so-called collapse of the wave function, as a change in information, as folk such as Einstein and Schoedinger thought, in the early days. In this respect, I think it gets rid of some more of the (apparently) non-classical features of quantum mechanics, by saying that they don’t amount to anything physically real.” 

To that end, scientists who work on retrocausality will continue to develop new theoretical models that attempt to account for more and more experimental phenomena. Eventually, these concepts could inspire experimental techniques that might provide evidence either for, or against, a future that can influence the past. 

“The goal is to come up with a more general model,” Wharton concluded. “Whether or not me, or anyone else, will be successful remains to be seen, but I’m heartened that more and more physicists are taking this seriously as an unexplored option. Maybe we should explore it.”