Laboratory Demonstration of Retroactive Influence in a Digital System
Retrocausation has been postulated in physical systems and observed in animate systems. The experiments described here extend methods used in human experiments to systems that are inanimate. One random-event generator, the controller-REG, was used to shut off a second REG, the subject-REG, at a random time. The output of the subject-REG was accumulated over several runs, each consisting of hundreds of trials, to look for a change in the randomness of its output bit stream in advance of the subject-REGs shut off. For the first three runs large changes were observed during the last second before shut off, changes of approximately 1 bit in 40 that exceeded odds against chance of 1 million to 1. Variations and later an exact replication of the early results failed to show the changes observed in the first three runs. This failure to replicate is an indication that there is an additional uncontrolled variable that must be taken into account, quite possibly the intention and enthusiasm of the experimenters. That addition leads to the question as to whether the subject-REG was subject to advance influence from its impending shut off, or instead whether its output was in a superposition of different states until the operator observed the results. The observation would then have caused a collapse of the superposition into a fixed state, like the collapse of quantum mechanical wavefunction. In either case, a retroactive influence was clearly in evidence.