Causal Structure and the Physical Address of a Past State
| Attributed author | Arthur Valerius Sterling |
|---|---|
| Date | 1963-10-18 |
| Place | Princeton |
| Layer | Hypothesis |
| Provenance | Attributed paper in the fictional Sterling archive |
Abstract
Modern physics describes time as a coordinate and relates clocks to motion and gravitation, but it does not provide a practicable method for recovering a particular past state. Sterling asks whether a sufficiently organized physical system may preserve a causal address of an earlier state without violating relativistic causality or requiring macroscopic reversal of entropy.
He distinguishes a physical record from a journey through time, and treats the biological application as provisional. He identifies no carrier for experiential information, decoding operation, or transition from material state to report.
The physical possibility of an archive is not the physical possibility of a memory. The possibility of a memory is not the possibility of a reader.
Editorial note
This paper is speculative and unresolved. Its references are real publications available no later than 1963; they do not validate Sterling's hypothesis.