The Future Already Knows
by Bruce Kasanoff
A flashlight flicks on. Just an everyday light source. But imagine this: the photons it emits — before anyone decides how long the flashlight will stay on — already behave differently based on that future choice.
This is not fiction. This is physics. Experimental physics, repeated over 365 days.
Julia Mossbridge, a cognitive neuroscientist with a sideline in messing with our understanding of time, just published her first peer-reviewed physics paper. The study replicates and expands on something she calls CADS — Causally Ambiguous Duration Sorting — and if she’s right, the implications are staggering.
Let me try to explain what she found, in plain language.
The Setup
You have a machine that turns on a light and records photon counts — how many little particles of light get absorbed — during a short “pre-decision” period. Then, after this, the machine randomly decides how long to keep the light on: sometimes a few seconds, sometimes several minutes.
The key here is that the machine doesn’t know the duration in advance. A truly random number generator (powered by a tank of scintillating oil, because apparently that’s a thing) makes the choice after the early measurements are taken.
Now here’s the kicker: those early photon counts — again, taken before the decision is made — vary in statistically significant ways depending on the future duration.
Let me say that again: particles of light seem to “know” how long they’ll be shining, before that decision has even been made.
What?
Exactly. This is why Mossbridge’s work is so hard to categorize. It’s not just “spooky action at a distance.” It’s spooky action back in time. It's as though time isn't flowing forward or backward at all, but unfolding all at once.
She puts it poetically: “Each event of a different duration may have its own distinct signature woven through the universal calculation of spacetime.”
This “woven” metaphor isn’t just artistic license. The photons appear to be grouped, entangled not just in space, but in time. The boundaries of their grouping aren’t spatial — they’re temporal: when the light turns on and when it turns off. These on-off times seem to define something like a shared identity across time.
The CADS Equation
Mossbridge was able to derive an equation that estimates the magnitude of this effect based on the future duration. The paper is based on physicist Winthrop William's replication data, but Mossbridge designed and conducted the analyses, and derived the equation. Previous papers (Mossbridge 2019, 2021) established the effect.
This is extraordinary. It suggests we’re not just seeing statistical noise, but a predictable, measurable relationship between future and past.
Now, before you start building a time machine or sending love letters to your former self, know this: the CADS effect doesn’t allow messaging the past — at least not yet. The data is still probabilistic and group-based, not individual and deterministic.
Still... the photons know. That much is clear.
And Then the Moon Showed Up
Just when things couldn’t get weirder, the year-long dataset revealed another anomaly: the photon absorption rates varied with the lunar cycle.
Yes. The Moon.
Specifically, photon counts dipped during both the new moon and the full moon — two phases with wildly different luminance. This suggests something more subtle at play, maybe gravitational or electromagnetic influences. Nobody knows yet.
But it’s a reminder that we’re swimming in unseen tides.
Why This Matters
If CADS holds up, it strengthens the idea that time is not a straight line. It hints that the universe may unfold all at once, and what we experience as the passage of time is just us walking through a pre-woven fabric.
It also means that some part of us — the unconscious mind, perhaps — may be sensitive to these ripples from the future. Mossbridge has been studying this human sensitivity for years. She believes our minds are already tapping into this timeless structure, in dreams, intuition, and moments we brush off as coincidence.
So maybe — just maybe — our sense of something happening before it happens has a quantifiable means of unfolding; it’s no more “woo woo” than the sun rising in the morning and setting in the evening. It’s just a form of perception we don’t yet understand.
The Bottom Line
We may not be living in linear time.
Instead, we might be navigating a universe that’s whispering clues from every direction — future included.
Now, I want to share portions of a subsequent conversation I had with Julia.
Bruce: Let me ask you why you connect love and time. (As her website says, she is "ruthlessly focused on developing a deep understanding of love, time, technology, and how these human experiences relate to corresponding physical forces.")
Julia: There are a couple answers to that. One is what I am aware right now and there may be answers in the future of which I'm not aware.
When you start thinking about time like this—like a circle—you start thinking about causality moving forward and backwards. You realize that when you're looking at a person including yourself, because of the way memory works, for the most part, you're only taking into account the forces that have acted from the past.
But assuming there are forces acting from the future all the way till my death, let's say there's forces acting from the future so that every moment is an agreement between the past and the future. Judging someone based on what you know now with no knowledge of what the future forces are that are acting on them is a heinous crime. So judgment itself becomes a non-starter... It's too complex.
So the only response to that situation is unconditional love. Changing your mind about how time works actually forces you to reckon with the idea of I don't know enough to judge anyone. Unconditional love is the only answer. It's the only humane answer.
(Important note from Bruce. That's a big statement Julia shared. In my experience, you have to sit with this for a while and let it sink in. In some respects, it's a variation on the idea that we should never judge another person without knowing their whole story: how they were raised, have they experienced trauma or loss, what obstacles have they encountered. Julia is adding a big variable to the equation, which is that if information from the future seeps into the present, we can never know another person's whole story.)
Julia: Another way is that I have spent a little time training people to do pre-cognitive remote viewing, which changes their thinking about time. And I've just seen operationally that their capacity to love and to tap into unconditional love improves. It's almost like it's a spiritual path. (Note: Julia is co-author of the book The Premonition Code: The Science of Precognition, How Sensing the Future Can Change Your Life.)
I feel there is a connection that I don't totally understand. And then vice versa, the data from just having people with a metric to measure the capacity to feel all the conditional love in that moment, having people rate themselves on that metric and then do a precognitive task, those who are rated higher on that metric are actually performing better on the precognitive task, significantly better than those who rate themselves lower on that metric in that moment. So that shows another sort of directionality.
So there seems to be some kind of relationship between your capacity to reflect that you might be receiving information from the future or that the future could cause the now and an opening up. And it seems to go both ways.
Bruce: It seems to me that what you just said is a huge lever for changing people and society. If we are getting information from both the past and the future—but not truly comprehending the future—then we must be less judgmental and offer more unconditional love. Because we never have the whole picture.
Julia: We're all doing the best we can. Literally no one is capable of doing anything other than the best they can.
Bruce: Right, but I heard you say that this not just shifts your attitudes, it might also shift what you're capable of doing.
Julia: It shifts your awareness of the information that you are getting from the future. That brings it more into conscious awareness—like opening a door. If we assume that we're in the middle here and we've got the past effects and we've got the future effects and we're not aware of the future effects causes for the most part consciously, but our unconscious mind is. The future is affecting our behaviors through our unconscious mind.
By tapping into unconditional love and expanding that out, it actually changes your capacity. Now, you can actually consciously receive some of this information from the future, not all of it at once; that would be too much. Can't do that. But just specifically related to a particular need.
You have to be careful with this stuff because some people will read that and they'll say, well, my family was killed in an accident. Does that mean I wasn't in a loving state?
It's really not compassionate to say that this is happening all the time, and if you just tap into it. You have to be very careful. We're not as in control of all this as we like to think we are. So magic happened to you. You got to be in a state where you got that information. You didn't even have to think about it. Your body just did it, and that saved your life and that's great.
And how can we move ourselves to where more people are having that experience? I think that's where working on unconditional love comes in.
++
One of the things Julia told me before we finished is that we should never think, "I'm just one person, what can I do?"
At one point, I used that phrase, and later she pushed back, saying, "Don't be one person. You're not one person. That's bullshit. When we think we are one person and we have to do a thing, that's the biggest avenue that takes you to failure.
"I'm really wanting you to hear that because the flow that you had in those moments (we were discussing from my past experiences) is the exact flow. That's when you're not one person, you're connected to the universe. That's what brings your work into the world."
Spread unconditional love.
Know that we are all connected.