(Anyone with a short attention span can skip this. It's as long as I need it to be, and really kinda short compared to average undergrad academic papers dealing with subjects of similar complexity.)

LOL - I really must subscribe to that magazine. (They don't let you read it online.) I'd like to see the letters from physicists that come in for this one!

Even not having read it yet, I can say it seems to contradict experimentally proven aspects of spacetime theory, which is quite deterministic - past present and future are relative to the observer: for his or her "present", each observer sees different sets of simultaneous events from other observers; each is seeing a different slice of 4-dimensional spacetime. So, past, present and future all exist; the "worldtube" of every object in the universe exists throughout its timeline, not just at the present. It's "already there" in the future, and still exists in the past, so to speak. Its entire history is given. (Read Herman Minkowski and Arthur Eddington as well as Einstein, if you don't want to take my word for it. Yes, it means that free will, *as we think of it*, is an illusion.) It's radical, yes, but relativity, both special and general, *has* been shown to be valid by experiments. (Our understanding still hasn't really caught up with the radical philosophical implications of relativity, a hundred years later.) If the state of the universe, in all its parts, then, is given, then how can you retroactively change it?

So my reaction, too, is that this changing the world retroactively is absurd (somehow observation of probabilistic quantum events gets expanded into a general quasi-psychokinetic or psychomorphic "wish and it will be [or was] so" power?), and must be based on some fundamental misunderstanding of

a) the relationship between observation of quantum events and the fundamental physical laws of the universe. How is it that observing a photon (or other particle) can affect things like Planck's constant or the speed of light or *any* of the conditions that are the basis for our "Goldilocks" universe?

b) the role of observation in quantum mechanics itself. The bit about "the observer get to determine, for example, if an observed photon is a wave or a particle" sounds pretty dodgy. From everything I've studied, observation has nothing to do with resolving the wave-particle duality, only with fixing the location of a photon at a given moment, the moment of observation; it is a wave *until* an observation is made. The wave is the unobserved state. That's not really choosing to make it a wave or particle; no action or observation of any sort by an observer "makes" it a wave. The observer can only "make" it a particle. But even if I don't quite have that right - Feynman's warning that "if you think you understand quantum mechanics, you haven't" applies, perhaps - there's another problem:

c) the relationship between quantum level events and the macroscopic realm of "classical" (non-quantum) laws, i.e., the relativistic 4-dimensional spacetime of the universe or multiverse. Observations affecting events at the quantum level have nothing to do with events at higher levels (molecules, complex biochemicals, cells, organisms, etc. on up.) To illustrate this I offer a quote from my philosophy of science professor's book Relativity and the Nature of Spacetime ( www.amazon.ca/Relativity-...p/3540238891 ):

"The irrelevance of the quantum mechanical argument for the debate over the nature of spacetime is perhaps best seen from the fact that you are able to read this text. The equations of motion govern the behaviour of quantum objects at the microscopic level, where electrons, protons, neutrons, atoms. etc., live. All these entities act in accordance with the probabilistic laws of quantum mechanics. However, when the quantum mechanical equations of motion are applied at the macroscopic level, according to Bohr's correspondence principle, they should coincide with the classical equations of motion. In the case of spacetime this means that no matter how the constituents of the worldline of a given object behave - deterministically or probabilistically - it will not affect the shape of the worldline. To illustrate this situation better, consider the letters of the text you are reading. Each letter consists of billions of electrons, protons, etc., whose behaviour is probabilistic. If the probabilistic nature of quantum mechanics were also manifested at the macroscopic level (the level of the letters on this page), then all letters would also behave in a probabilistic manner - constantly changing their shape and jumping around."

There's got to be a fallacy somewhere in that guy's reasoning.

"altering the nature of history... history is fluid dependant on obervation ">

Ah, well, this is where they always go wrong when messing with postmodern theory and trying to make it have bastard babies with their misunderstanding of how the observational instrument affects observation. So many misunderstandings, so little time....relatively speaking...

Voodoo - "Does that mean that if we all pitch in and make a concerted effort, we can retroactively make the creation story in Genesis become literally true?"

Only if you have faith.....