aether...I thought of you while reading this...lol

Wheeler & Feynman
J. A. Wheeler and R.P. Feynman attempted to derive the ordinary irreversibility of radiation from the time-reversibility of Maxwell's equations. They argued that the observed properties of an electric charge, that it radiates energy and suffers damping of its motion can be explained in terms of an "absorber theory of radiation". They used the Schwarzschild- Tetrode-Fokker equation for a flat space and found that they had to postulate both "advanced" (future) and "retarded" (past) fields; the divisions of time seemed to be "inextricably mixed". ...Wheeler and Feynman assumed that (a) time-asymmetry is initially present; and (b) persists on a purely statistical basis. J.E. Hogarth(5) showed that assumption (b) is inconsistent with any realistic absorber theory of radiation. He and D.W. Sciama argued that the Wheeler-Feynman theory of radiation holds in the Steady-State cosmologies of Hoyle and Narlikar, but not in general, in the Einstein-de Sitter models. (C.T.K. Chari) (4:216)

The dependence of the electromagnetic arrow of time on the thermodynamic arrow was a feature of the absorber theory formulated by Wheeler and Feynman (1945). In an attempt to produce a theory of charged elementary particles which avoided the difficulties that had beset previous theories of their interaction with electromagnetic fields, they introduced the hypothesis that every photon has an absorber as well as an emitter. In their theory an accelerated charged particle emits radiation equally into the past and future. In other words, retarded and advanced waves are generated symmetrically. If the radiation is confined to an opaque enclosure, so that all of it is absorbed, the waves striking the walls will cause the charged particles therein to radiate likewise into both the past and the future. Wheeler and Feynman showed that if the enclosure is fully opaque, the advanced waves emitted by the walls will just cancel those from the source particle and only the retarded waves will be left. ... Moreover, since all attempts to produce a quantum-mechanical version of the absorber theory lead to the same difficulties as previous theories of the interactions of charged particles with the electromagnetic field, there is no strong argument in its favour and in fact its original proponents have abandoned it. (2:341-342)