Escaping From Time

"The other inmates stand in a long straight line, flanked by guards, and I am dragged past them. I do not respect them, because they will not run - will not try to escape."

I like to entertain strange physics ideas all the time. (Seriously, I'm the unruly inmate that the physicist 'guards' don't like. ;)

Since my physics education has been fairly piecemeal, the pieces occasionally get put together in interesting ways. For example, the EPR paradox came up the other day. Having time on the brain, it occurred to me to wonder why the EPR paradox is even a paradox at all...

A and B are entangled (which means weirdly connected in an I-am-you and you-are-me kind of way) particles departing in opposite directions from the same source. When A is measured, B can always be found in the corresponding/complementary state, even though A has no local-causes way to communicate its state to B. (As if B would just obligingly accept such information and agree to be found in the corresponding state when its turn came to be measured.) Physicists are perplexed because they cannot explain how A and B can be connected in such a way as to allow them to 'know' which state the other is in. And certainly not how they could 'know' without the transmission of such information occurring at a faster-than-light speed. Yet A and B are always perfectly in sync.

This situation is perplexing when viewed with time moving in a single direction, but the confusion evaporates (for me, at least) when temporal symmetry is restored. I can see very well how B 'knows' what state A will be in if I visual time flowing backwards from the point of measurement to the point where A and B were created together, as well as forward. Time, or something that underlies it, would be flowing in both directions at once.

Whatever is carried/retained as time moves subjectively forward can presumably be carried/retained as time moves subjectively backward. I'm not going to go into speculation about what that might be because, frankly, I don't know how to do that with standard physics constructs. (Physicists 'guards' are welcome to jump in with helpful explanations as to why this can't be so, or throw up their hands in despair at the uber-obvious piece of the picture that I am probably missing. I got briefly sidetracked by the Transactional Interpretation of quantum mechanics, but that seems to reflect something a little bit different.)

This explanation for the EPR paradox makes sense to me because I think that we can access information that appears to be from our subjective future. (As in, the information correlates more heavily with what we experience in the subjective future than it does with what we experience in the subjective past. Think precognition.) This involves significantly rethinking our definition of, and relationship with, time, which is always a fun exercise. ;)

[Fair warning: I'm coming after entropy too. Just because I can. Just because it's fun.]