Tbe Tbird Storm of the Twentietb Century
O. Costa de Beauregard
A paradox, according to dictionaries, is a surprising but perhaps true statement. Copernicus's heliocentrism was once a paradox. The problem with a true paradox is not in reducing it but in expressing it--as Einstein did with his relativity theory expressing the physical content of the Lorentz-Poincare' formulas of electrodynamics. Today again we have good formulas, those of quantum mechanics, but have not yet understood all their meaning. It is the paradox uncovered by Einstein at the 1927 Solvay Conference (and better known as the Einstein-Podolsky-Rosen [E.P.R.) paradox) which forces us to a dramatic revision of traditional ways of thinking about time. The paradox emerges with special clarity from a conceptual experiment in which two spatially separated systems on the quantum scale are made to interact, but the only causal link between them is by way of an event in their common past. The paradox can be expressed in terms of the formal (de jure) symmetry between retarded and advanced interactions in physical theory, interactions which affect the future and the past respectively, independently of the de facta preponderance in nature of retarded interactions. The possibility that advanced interactions may occur de facta in large-scale systems is briefly discussed. * Lecture delivered at the Third Conference of the International Society for the Study of Time, Alpbach, July 1-10 (1976).
•Jan 1, 1978•0 citations