The Future Already Knows
A peer-reviewed physics paper has startling conclusions
A flashlight flicks on. Just an everyday light source. But imagine this: the photons it emits — before anyone decides how long the flashlight will stay on — already behave differently based on that future choice.
This is not fiction. This is physics. Experimental physics, repeated over 365 days.
Julia Mossbridge, a cognitive neuroscientist with a sideline in messing with our understanding of time, just published her first peer-reviewed physics paper. The study replicates and expands on something she calls CADS — Causally Ambiguous Duration Sorting — and if she’s right, the implications are staggering.
Let me try to explain what she found, in plain language.
The Setup
You have a machine that turns on a light and records photon counts — how many little particles of light get absorbed — during a short “pre-decision” period. Then, after this, the machine randomly decides how long to keep the light on: sometimes a few seconds, sometimes several minutes.
The key here is that the machine doesn’t know the duration in advance. A truly random number generator (powered by a tank of scintillating oil, because apparently that’s a thing) makes the choice after the early measurements are taken.
Now here’s the kicker: those early photon counts — again, taken before the decision is made — vary in statistically significant ways depending on the future duration.
Let me say that again: particles of light seem to “know” how long they’ll be shining, before that decision has even been made.
What?
Exactly. This is why Mossbridge’s work is so hard to categorize. It’s not just “spooky action at a distance.” It’s spooky action back in time. It's as though time isn't flowing forward or backward at all, but unfolding all at once.
She puts it poetically: “Each event of a different duration may have its own distinct signature woven through the universal calculation of spacetime.”
This “woven” metaphor isn’t just artistic license. The photons appear to be grouped, entangled not just in space, but in time. The boundaries of their grouping aren’t spatial — they’re temporal: when the light turns on and when it turns off. These on-off times seem to define something like a shared identity across time.
The CADS Equation
Mossbridge was able to derive an equation that estimates the magnitude of this effect based on the future duration. The paper is based on physicist Winthrop William's replication data, but Mossbridge designed and conducted the analyses, and derived the equation. Previous papers (Mossbridge 2019, 2021) established the effect.
This is extraordinary. It suggests we’re not just seeing statistical noise, but a predictable, measurable relationship between future and past.
Now, before you start building a time machine or sending love letters to your former self, know this: the CADS effect doesn’t allow messaging the past — at least not yet. The data is still probabilistic and group-based, not individual and deterministic.
Still... the photons know. That much is clear.
And Then the Moon Showed Up
Just when things couldn’t get weirder, the year-long dataset revealed another anomaly: the photon absorption rates varied with the lunar cycle.
Yes. The Moon.
Specifically, photon counts dipped during both the new moon and the full moon — two phases with wildly different luminance. This suggests something more subtle at play, maybe gravitational or electromagnetic influences. Nobody knows yet.
But it’s a reminder that we’re swimming in unseen tides.
Why This Matters
If CADS holds up, it strengthens the idea that time is not a straight line. It hints that the universe may unfold all at once, and what we experience as the passage of time is just us walking through a pre-woven fabric.
It also means that some part of us — the unconscious mind, perhaps — may be sensitive to these ripples from the future. Mossbridge has been studying this human sensitivity for years. She believes our minds are already tapping into this timeless structure, in dreams, intuition, and moments we brush off as coincidence.
So maybe — just maybe — our sense of something happening before it happens has a quantifiable means of unfolding; it’s no more “woo woo” than the sun rising in the morning and setting in the evening. It’s just a form of perception we don’t yet understand.
The Bottom Line
We may not be living in linear time.
Instead, we might be navigating a universe that’s whispering clues from every direction — future included.
Ponder that this weekend.
This is an astonishingly important finding, and it resonates deeply with some of my own work exploring coherence and observer-dependent structure within Wolfram’s Ruliad. Mossbridge’s CADS effect feels like an empirical ripple in branchial space — where different observers trace divergent computational histories through a shared substrate of causal potential.
What stands out is the implication that the rate at which different branches of the computational universe update may vary relative to one another — and that coherence across these branches can produce the appearance of retrocausal influence when they come into contact. I’ve been working on reconceptualizing time dilation in Wolfram’s framework, and CADS feels like an important empirical piece of that puzzle.
In the model I’m developing, there are no fundamental temporal dimensions. The universe unfolds as a rule-based computation. What we perceive as “time” is an emergent artifact — the result of intelligent systems inferring an ordering of events from their position within branchial space. CADS may point to a deeper truth: that what we experience as temporal causation is actually the stitching together of patterns that exhibit coherence across branching updates, some of which only become legible to an observer once branches intersect.
I'm building a philosophical framework around how negentropic structures — systems that generate sustainable coherence — might arise within this computationally irreducible substrate. Until now, it's been primarily theoretical work, but CADS could offer one of the first glimpses of these dynamics made observable.
If anyone is thinking along similar lines — philosophically, physically, or cognitively — I’d love to connect. If the future is not a place but a pattern, then perhaps our deepest task is learning how to tune ourselves to coherence before it becomes obvious.
To put as plainly as I can; mind blown 🤯 - job done.