I just read the April 2010 issue of Discover Magazine. Two articles on physics and time blew my socks off. My mind is reeling with the possibilities of what I just read (and no, this is NOT an April Fool's joke by the magazine or by me).

Day-by-day I am becoming more and more interested in esoteric topics like quantum time, quantum gravity, and quantum mechanics (it's all "quantum" these days). For example, see my reviews on the books In Search of Time, Reinventing Gravity, and Universe on a T-Shirt.

But I have to tell you that I was completely blown away by a couple of articles in the April 2010 issue of Discover magazine. If you don’t already subscribe to this magazine, I urge you to race down to your local magazine supplier (Barnes and Noble is a good one in the USA) and purchase this issue NOW!

One of the foundations of physics is that the underlying rules are eternal, unbreakable, and the same throughout the universe (or at least, throughout our portion of the multi-universe ... if there is such a beast). Well, theoretical biologist Stuart Kauffman (a MacArthur "genius award" winner) has turned his attention to physics, and he's come up with a new idea.

As opposed to their being fixed for all time, Kauffman proposes that the physical laws of the universe may themselves evolve over time. As the article notes:

Just as evolution in biology systems favors change from the simple to the more complex, perhaps evolution has taken the universe from the relative simplicity of its early moments to the full glory of our modern universe in all its dazzling complexity.

In fact, physical laws that can evolve would help answer all sorts of issues, including the origin and nature of time itself. Why don’t we see these changes happening now? Well, maybe everything has now settled down, or maybe such changes happen so slowly that we can't detect them with our current instruments, or maybe it's just that we haven’t been looking for stuff like this. Actually, we may already have detected something like this; again, I quote from the article:

From measurements of the radiation given off by distant quasars, scientists have surmised that "alpha," the physical constant that defines how tightly electrons are held to an atom's nucleus, may have been slightly different in the early universe."

But wait, there's more... generally speaking most of us tend to accept that things that have happened in the past affect the way things are now, and things that happen now will affect the way things turn out in the future. Furthermore, I dare to suggest that most of us don’t believe that things that may (or may not) happen in the future can affect the way things are in the present...

... if only things were so simple. In another article, we read about a guy called Jeff Tollaksen who is currently at Chapman University in Orange County. Jeff has spent years pondering the really confusing aspects about quantum mechanics like the uncertainty principle and superposition and why you can measure where a particle is or how fast it's moving but not both (the more accurately you measure one aspect, the less precisely you can determine the other).

This article is too involved to go into in depth here. Suffice it to say that Tollaksen and his colleagues have spent years coming up with some very clever experiments that address these issues by showing how events in the future can modify actions in the past and present (depending on where you happen to be at the time, of course). I know this all sounds totally unbelievable – you have to read the article.

And, thinking about it, even if this is an April Fool's spoof on the part of the folks at discover magazine (in which case it is one of the most amazingly detailed ones I've ever seen, and I would happily take my hat off to them)... everything I've talked about here could be true.

So what do you think ... is this just a prank, or might it be possible?

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