Wheeler's delayed-choice thought experiment and Kim et al.'s 1999 quantum eraser, published in Physical Review Letters, produced the poster result: choosing to erase which-path information after a photon is detected appears to restore interference, as if the future choice rewrote the past. The community's verdict is colder: the results reveal the structure of quantum correlations, not backward influence, and only a minority of researchers read retrocausality in. Wheeler himself concluded the past does not exist independently of its recording in the present, a subtler and stranger claim than time travel.
Retrocausality is the respectable coat that everything else in this wing wants to borrow: precognition studies, prophecy, prayer, destiny, and the Mandela Effect's timeline-merge all cite the eraser. What the experiment licenses: correlations across time that classical intuition forbids. What it does not license: messages, edits, or a past that changes its text after publication. The gap between those two sentences is the size of the entire parapsychology industry.
The claim: retrocausality's real content is archival, the past is not a fixed record but a settlement between present measurements, so history is continuously recompiled at the resolution of what is now asked, and the future does not change the past, it finalizes it. Verdict: this is Wheeler's own participatory-universe reading, respectable and radical. The archive files it as the physics version of its core doctrine: the record is not the territory. The record is the negotiation.
If the past exists only as recorded in the present, who is holding the pen?