"What I discovered was very surprising," Aharonov said. "In fact, if you're willing to look at the particle and get very little information, and repeat the experiment many, many times, you can collect all this information, then find out something about the state of each particle."
In the laboratory, that has allowed scientists to reveal the influence of the future on the past, at least in the microscopic realm, he says.
A mass of information collected in the present might appear disorganized and meaningless, a jumble of noisy signals.
But by making certain measurements in the future, some of the separate bits of noisy information are suddenly revealed as part of a coherent whole.
It's as if a message, "the cat is smiling," is broken up and scattered among a series of sealed envelopes, then mixed in with many other envelopes containing random noise.
Only measurements in the future can reveal the key that allows the message-bearing envelopes to be found and reassembled to give meaning; otherwise, they are just part of the noise.
"The difference between the particles cannot be discovered in the past," he said. "Maybe nature is trying to tell us that the world, in the present, should be described by two informations: one coming from the past, and one coming from the future."
In other words, the future influences and alters the past.
"This is basically a new reformulation of physics," Aharonov says. "It looks at time in a new way."