EARTH Portation curated news: June 2015

SCIENCE - Scientists show future events decide what happens in the past

“A future event causes the photon to decide its past.”
Cause and effect appear to be reversed.
Time went backwards.
Andrew Truscott researcher scientists at the Australian National University said in a press release that they have proven that "reality does not exist if you are not looking at it.”
An experiment by Australian scientists has proven that what happens to particles in the past is only decided when they are observed and measured in the future. Until such time, reality is just an abstraction.
Particles can also tunnel through solid objects, which should normally be impenetrable barriers, like a ghost passing through a wall. And now scientists have proven that, what is happening to a particle now, isn't governed by what has happened to it in the past, but by what state it is in the future – effectively meaning that, at a subatomic level, time can go backwards.
Einstein called it "spooky" and Niels Bohr, a pioneer of quantum theory once said: “if quantum mechanics hasn’t profoundly shocked you, you haven’t understood it yet.”
Australia's New.com.au explains,
"Photons are weird. You can see the effect yourself when shining a light through two narrow slots. The light behaves both like a particle, going through each slot and casting direct light on the wall behind it — and like a wave, generating an interference pattern resulting in more than two stripes of light." a particle lacks definite physical properties and is defined only by the probabilities of it being in different states, it exists in a suspended state, a sort of super-animation until it is actually observed, at which point, it takes on the form of either a particle or wave, while still having the properties of both.
"What makes a photon decide when to be one or the other?"
When a photon wave/particle is observed, it collapses, so it wasn't possible to see it in both states at once. Thus, it isn't possible to measure both the position of a particle and its momentum at the same time.
The Australian scientists set up an experiment similar to the double-slit one to try to estimate when particles took on a particle or wave form, but instead of using light, they applied helium atoms, which are "heavier" than light photons, in the sense that photons have no mass, whereas atoms do.
“Quantum physics predictions about interference seem odd enough when applied to light, which seems more like a wave, but to have done the experiment with atoms, which are complicated things that have mass and interact with electric fields and so on, adds to the weirdness.”the atom passed through it on many paths in a wave form, whether it continued as a particle or changed into a wave wasn't decided until a future event had already taken place. Time went backwards. Cause and effect appear to be reversed. The future caused the past. The arrow of time seemed to work in reverse.The decisive point when its form was decided was when the quantum event was observed and measured. Whatever would take place existed in a suspended state, the atom had not yet "decided" what to do.'
http://www.digitaljournal.com/science/experiment-shows-future-events-decide-what-happens-in-the-past/article/434829#ixzz3cU6VyRXR