The quantum mechanical notion of unobservable causal loop and the anthropic principle

TL;DR

This paper explores how unobservable causal loops in quantum mechanics, when time-symmetrized, can complete the anthropic principle and explain universe evolution with quantum speedup.

Contribution

It introduces a quantum causal loop framework that completes the anthropic principle and accounts for universe evolution involving quantum speedup.

Findings

Causal loops explain quantum speedup and nonlocality.

Time-symmetrized quantum descriptions involve unobservable causal loops.

The framework suggests a universe evolution compatible with quantum speedup.

Abstract

It can be argued that the ordinary description of the reversible quantum process between two one-to-one correlated measurement outcomes is incomplete because, by not specifying the direction of causality, it allows causal structures that violate the time symmetry that is required of a reversible process. This also means that it can be completed simply by time-symmetrizing it, namely by requiring that the initial and final measurements evenly contribute to the selection of their correlated pair of outcomes. This leaves the description unaltered but shows that it is the quantum superposition of unobservable time-symmetrized instances whose causal structure is completely defined. Each instance consists of a causal loop: the final measurement that changes backwards in time the input state of the unitary transformation that leads to the state immediately before it. In former works, we have shown that such loops exactly explain the quantum computational speedup and quantum nonlocality. In this work we show that they lead to a completion of the anthropic principle that allows a universe evolution with quantum speedup.