It sounds like what is being described in the article is more or less the intuitive understanding of past and future which I imagine most people have. Is there a better summary of this model that someone can provide?
Anyway, the title made me think of this passage from a lecture of Alan Watts. He's describing the universe as you experience it when you are first born (the universe in its truest nature to a taoist):
" When one experiences oneself and the universe as happening together, the other illusion one is liable to have is that what is happening now follows necessarily from what happened in the past. But you don't know anything about that in your primal ignorance. Cause and effect? Why obviously not, because if you are really naive you see that the past is the result of what is happening now. It goes backward into the past, like a wake goes backward from a ship. All the echoes are disappearing finally; they go away, and away, and away. And it is all starting now."
It seems to me that this article is not saying anything at all. Instead of the commonplace "the future becomes the past" it says "the past crystallizes from the future", which is arguably the same thing.
Just another example for the importance of selling your research in the right way. Marketing wins.
Yes, "the future becomes the past". But I think the point of this article to to reconcile this concept with experiments that affect the past.
From page 17, discussing such experiments:
"Many of them in fact assume that the future already exists (if the future did not already exist, it would of course not be able to influence the present or past). Our claim, by contrast, is that the future does not yet exist; at present the future is merely a set of possibilities."
Still, it sounds like philosophical wishy washy. What does "exists" even mean? If a "set of possibilities" exists, you could equally say "the future exists".
No mention of the 2nd law of thermodynamics, at least in the review. I'll stick with Feynman's interpretation for now, http://research.microsoft.com/apps/tools/tuva/ (select Feynman's videos, then lecture 5).
Anyway, the title made me think of this passage from a lecture of Alan Watts. He's describing the universe as you experience it when you are first born (the universe in its truest nature to a taoist):
" When one experiences oneself and the universe as happening together, the other illusion one is liable to have is that what is happening now follows necessarily from what happened in the past. But you don't know anything about that in your primal ignorance. Cause and effect? Why obviously not, because if you are really naive you see that the past is the result of what is happening now. It goes backward into the past, like a wake goes backward from a ship. All the echoes are disappearing finally; they go away, and away, and away. And it is all starting now."