HOME Eclectic	Does the future affect the present? Imagine that you bought 10 ES contracts (the emini contracts of the popular futures contract of S&P 500) at 1090 (a pretty recent price as of this writing) and decided to unload them at time T1 and T2 (T2>T1), say, on the very same day. Do you think that unloading a part of your position at T2 (the later time) affects the price at T1?  In other words, does the future affect the present? Well, the answer we believe to be correct and the one we are pretty used to is that it does not. The future is affected by the past or the present, but not vice a versa.  Are you sure? Well, if so, then this excellent article in Discover that I have just come across will no doubt come as a huge surprise to you. I has come as quite a surprise even to me and that despite the fact that I had been somewhat familiar with these issues, yet not familiar enough, as it turned out, for I have not followed them closely for over a decade. And a lot of things have changed during this time, especially in the realm of experiments. The thing is that the future seems to affect the past, at least as far as quantum, meaning (for the sake of simplicity) microscopic, phenomena are concerned, but perhaps even in more general situations, although the effects in such ("classical" as physicists like to say) situations are highly unlikely to be significant, hence your unloading of a few contracts at T2 is really unlikely to bear any impact on the price of the other part of your position at T1, just as you probably, and rightly, suspected. I read this article with a particular pleasure for I happen to know all the major figures mentioned in it. Alonso Botero, mentioned at the end of it, was a good friend of mine when we were both physics graduate students. I enjoyed hanging out with him drinking beer and talking physics. We would have a lot of fun. It was through Alonso that I met Jeff Tollaksen, featured prominently in the article, back then also another graduate student. Both were students at Boston University and both were working under Professor Yakir Aharonov, whom I happened to meet too and even to take some summer course from. Professor Aharonov, also featured in this article, is one of the most distinguished quantum physicists of our time.  Chances are that the research in this exciting area, pretty well elaborated on by the article, which he originated decades ago will finally give him a well-deserved physics Nobel Prize, although, I believe, he has earned one already for his other work, such as on the celebrated Aharonov-Bohm effect. His next opportunity to win "that Swedish prize," as Feynman once called it, is only about a month away; he was rumored to be on the short list of candidates in 2009, so perhaps the rumors will come true this time around and I sincerely wish him just that. You will find more about these issues, their interpretation, still pretty open to the debate, and philosophical implications in the article that can be accessed online.
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