The Determination of Past by Future Events

Abstract

Any physical theory which seriously proposes that events in the future may be the efficient causes of events in the past certainly may be regarded—at least at first glance—as a rather revolutionary doctrine. In a recent issue of the Reviews of Modern Physics (Vol. 17, Nos. 2 & 3, p. 157) commemorating Niels Bohr's sixtieth birthday, and under the editorship of the latest Nobel Prize winner in physics, W. Pauli, there appeared such a theory—written by Bohr's former student, J. A. Wheeler and Wheeler's associate (and former student) at Princeton, R. P. Feynman. The title of their paper appears harmless enough: “Interaction with the Absorber as the Mechanism of Radiation.” It is one part of a more comprehensive three-part paper intended for later publication as a general constructive critique of classical field theory (Maxwell's electrodynamics) and of the theory of action at a distance as propounded by Schwarzschild and Fokker. (In passing, we note that in this more general paper there is derived the Frenkel solution of the old problem of infinite self-energy of the point-charge electron.)