Best enjoyed along side the music: /zUvjMDEtpYE
Chapter 3 - 確な現在 ~ Future-Past Uncertainty
"Gah!" my voice finally put an end to the silent beginning of the audio file. "Why is time so messy? I can barely understand this!"
"What's so messy about it that it's confusing you?" the Professor asked.
"How can the past and future be entangled if we live in an observed universe? Doesn't that mean we live in a totally collapsed timeline? How is it possible there is both future and past uncertainty in these conditions?"
"Hmm..." I remembered this was a hard one for the Professor.
"Imagine," she started, "You're trying to catch a photon moving away from you at the speed of light. Now recall that things farther away from you are in the past equal to the time that it took for the information to reach you, which is the time it takes for the light to reach your eyes. If information of the photon could reach you, even at the speed of light, it would be delayed.
"Now let's say that it's not a photon, but a spaceship you're chasing. Now we run into a classic Relativity problem; the spaceship is going to experience time dilation where it effectively will end up in the future. So as it travels away from us, is it in the past, or in the future? The answer is simple, it's both, and as you approach the ship the system collapses towards what we would consider its true position in spacetime. The 'two' spaceships, the one in the past and the one in the future are entangled until you observe the actual spaceship in your relative present. Does that make sense to you?"
"I think so," I said.
"Then all you need to do is apply that to everything else. Remember that objects in the night sky are in the past ordinate to the time it has taken for the light to travel to Earth. If we could instantly move to the position we saw an object in the night sky, we'd miss it because of that time delay in information. Things don't have to exist in the extremes for the same result as with the spaceship. What we call the present really is just a pinch, a point of near total certainty, between two infinitely expanding areas of uncertainty. You could also look at it like a broken zipper, moving along the chain, but never closing it, except for the one part it is on. Things like timelines really don't exist, or at least not the way you might think about it initially. There's no collapsed or uncollapsed timelines, only the chain of the zipper that we follow."
"I see. So even though I'm observing the universe around me, the delay of information means that actually seeing something doesn't necessarily always collapse a system."
"Precisely! It's the old saying 'seeing is not always believing, ' except I guess in this case I guess it's 'seeing is not always observing.'"
But what of things that can only be believed with neither directly seeing or otherwise observing? There is an entire universe of information that we cannot observe, simply by virtue of light photons carrying it away from us. Who knows what could possibly exist in it.
