Why Mathematical Formulas Only Work Backwards in Time, Not Forward
For example, if I say: E = mc² applies to something that has already happened, that can be correct.
But if I say: E = mc² applies in the future, that is like laying down a tarot card. You are looking for a law that can predict the future—but that is impossible.
You can only describe what has already happened.
The past is limited to the amount of knowledge available at that time.
The future is not limited, because we can discover things we do not yet know.
It’s like thoughts: you can only think of something in terms of what you know, but you don’t know what you don’t know—and therefore cannot predict what will happen.
Reality Just Goes On
I want to investigate whether the probability of heads or tails with a fair coin is 50/50.
I built a robot that can flip a coin in a fair way.
The robot is going to flip the coin 1 quadrillion times.
After a quarter of the experiment, the robot breaks down: the experiment is paused for 20 of the 30 years.
At the end, these are the outcomes:
• 499,999,999,999,999,999,937 times tails
• 500,000,000,000,000,000,063 times heads
What is the correct conclusion?
A mathematician would say: the probability is 50/50, because the difference is extremely small. But there is an important detail you are missing. What is that detail?
A third outcome has emerged. When the robot broke down after a quarter of the experiment, that counts as an instance in which the coin did not land on heads or tails.
There is a third outcome that you don’t see as a third outcome, because you think that during that time you didn’t measure, and therefore it has nothing to do with the experiment — but it does.
The experiment lasted 30 years, and the robot was broken for 20 years. Then the portion of times the coin did not land on heads or tails is disproportionately large, much larger than you think.
This also applies to complex experiments, such as at CERN.
If your CERN machine is idle half of the time, you also have to count that as a third outcome.
Does this look familiar to you? This is how a quantum particle behaves. But a quantum particle doesn't behave like this at all. You're looking at reality the wrong way.
When you look back, it seems like it happened in only one way — but many things happened that you didn’t see. And the way something happened can be approached from different angles.
When you look ahead, anything can still happen, even things that are currently beyond your imagination.
Let’s learn from each other and celebrate that everyone sees reality in their own unique way.
Why this is important
Because you are always looking at everything at once. You cannot focus on just a small piece of reality. You are always observing everything at once, even if you cannot see it all simultaneously. It’s fine to delimit the world in a small experiment, but that’s not how it really works. You are still looking at everything at once.
What we have described above are things in retrospect—a measurement after the fact.
Looking forward in time works a little differently.
Within a single observation, you saw this:
• Heads
• Tails
• Neither heads nor tails (because the machine was broken)
It might seem like we can never really understand reality this way, since we can’t do controlled experiments. But we actually can, if we choose to make as many observations as possible. In other words: just write down everything you see. It’s fun.