The search for precognition in the physics of cause and effect as they apply to real occurrences like storms and plane crashes and fender benders “out in the world” is, I argue, to look in the wrong place.

With retrocausation, we can no longer privilege the past, as though causation is only a matter of “pushing” (sometimes called efficient causation). The real mystery becomes why those efficient causes are so much more apparent and intuitively understood, and why influences propagating in reverse give us headaches to even think about.

As hard as it is to wrap our heads around, retrocausation could radically simplify—even “collapse”—much of the famously mystical weirdness of quantum mechanics and explain why particles so often seem to know so much about their destinies.

In the 1970s, Austrian astrophysicist Erich Jantsch argued that these same basic principles underlie the regularities of social existence too, up to and including the cultural symbol systems used by humans to encode meaningful information and guide our behavior.7 Today, quantum information theory, discussed in the last chapter, is also being

John Wheeler, who studied under Bohr, underscored that observation not only brings the world into being but actually shapes it—an idea known as the “participatory universe.”

We should not confuse how difficult we find imagining a thing with how difficult nature finds accomplishing it.

J. B. Priestley, in a 1964 book on precognition and related questions called Man & Time, acknowledges that we cannot help but be biased in one direction or the other: “either we want life to be tidy, clear, fully understood, contained within definite limits, or we long for it to seem larger, wilder, stranger. Faced with some odd incident, either we

the wonderful precognition movie Arrival

The time-symmetric, retrocausal framework advanced by Aharonov and his colleagues is sometimes called the two-state vector formalism