The Symmetry of Cause & Effect

The Symmetry of Cause & Effect | Reality Sandwich: "As if the accelerating pace of the 21st Century were not enough, I am starting to suspect that the common notion of time as frantic but comfortably linear is hopelessly naïve -- that in order to adequately navigate our postmodern lives, we need a postmodern understanding of causality. The more I look, the more I find a growing body of evidence that time -- both as it is experienced and as it is disclosed by science -- is best understood as more of a loom than a river. Gathered here are just a few of the many independent programs that suggest that our ideas of cause and effect need to be drastically reworked.

Exhibit A: The Global Consciousness Project at Princeton University has discovered that the noise of the quantum vacuum occasionally organizes itself into very non-random patterns right before events of planetary emotional significance. As just one of many examples, their global grid of random number generators registered a massive spike of orderly activity that peaked during the 9/11 attacks…but started over four hours before the attacks occurred. A similar global spike of statistically unlikely quantum orderliness occurred the day of Barack Obama’s presidential inauguration. "