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The way I understand locality is that for an object to influence another object away from it, it has to do so through the space that separates them. It can shoot out an EM wave to the other object, emit radiation, or move itself to it, but something has to travel the space that separates them. This principle has been disproven by the phenomenom of entanglement in Quantum Physics.

What I'm referring to as "time locality" (I don't know the proper term for it) is the same concept applied to time. That means, for an object in the present to influence something an hour into the future, it has to do so through a chain of events that spans that hour. It has to influence something a milisecond into the future, which itself will influence something a milisecond later, until you reach one hour.

My question is, is there something that violates "time locality", like entanglement violates regular locality?

Guilherme Mendonça
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  • https://physics.stackexchange.com/questions/126622/quantum-entanglement-and-spooky-action-at-a-distance/126776#126776 – alanf Jun 16 '22 at 08:13

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This sounds like the fact that the state of a system is determined by its state in the past. If you keep track of all the relevant data, then in order for some event to affect some variable on the future, it must make some change on the state, which then propagates in time to cause the effect.

In fact, spatial locality is not really violated either. Locality is a very important principle in Quantum Field Theory, which, as the name suggests, is a fully quantum-mechanical theory. Entanglement is not capable of transmitting information and is only capable of achieving correlations that are impossible classically. What is true is that it is impossible to simulate quantum mechanics using a classical system without violating locality (or some other basic assumption), but nature has no need to obey this constraint.

Charles Wang
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