On 19 March 2014 12:47, meekerdb <[email protected]> wrote: > But in general that would mean knowing the state of everything the > system had interacted with in the past, since it is now entangled with > them. So even if you suppose there is no collapse of the wavefunction, > decoherence has the same effect. >
I was only asking about the theoretical possibility, given unrealistically perfect information about the state of the system. To put it another way, in the Game of Life, even with perfect information, you can't trace the state of the system backwards because it loses information. So even the laws of physics couldn't work backwards in a universe based on the GOL. QM, I'm informed, doesn't lose information, so (very much in theory) you could work backwards - or (less in theory) the laws of physics could. I wasn't asking whether I could build a chronoscope and watch the past happening on TV. -- You received this message because you are subscribed to the Google Groups "Everything List" group. To unsubscribe from this group and stop receiving emails from it, send an email to [email protected]. To post to this group, send email to [email protected]. Visit this group at http://groups.google.com/group/everything-list. For more options, visit https://groups.google.com/d/optout.
