THE LÖWDIN INVERSION
For decades, scientists have assumed that cause comes before effect.
A proton changes.
A molecule changes.
A gene changes.
A body changes.
The order seems obvious.
Until a physicist discovers an experiment in which a quantum event appears to produce its measurable outcome before the event that caused it.
The result should be impossible. It is repeated anyway.
Then an old paper by Per-Olov Löwdin offers something even stranger: a quantum proton moving between two positions in a DNA hydrogen bond can alter the way genetic information is subsequently read.
Separately, researchers are finding biological structures appearing in people that have no obvious inherited or environmental cause. Historical records reveal similar anomalies decades earlier. Astronomers uncover an object whose future passage may provide the missing piece.
One explanation begins to emerge.
What if the direction of causality is not as simple as we thought?
What if an event in the future can alter something that has already happened?
There is no experiment that can prove it.
Not yet.
The event that might finally answer the question is forty-one years away.
THE LÖWDIN INVERSION
A. JAY