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To: The Cajun

I was watching the Science Channel last week and it was explained thusly: The past must be consistent with the future. Therefore the future affects the past in that sense. The Universe will necessarily end in a particular way (the Big Crunch, the Big Rip, etc.), and whatever happens in the past must be consistent that ending. Similarly, you cannot go back in time and kill your own father when he was a little boy. You know he exists in the future and the past must be consistent with that. Therefore, you could not kill him in the past. The future affects the past.


18 posted on 05/28/2015 6:39:55 PM PDT by LibWhacker ("Every Muslim act of terror is follow by a political act of cover-up." -Daniel Greenfiel)
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To: LibWhacker
Similarly, you cannot go back in time and kill your own father when he was a little boy. You know he exists in the future and the past must be consistent with that. Therefore, you could not kill him in the past. The future affects the past.

What you said was true up until that point.

The physics of time-paradoxes [if they exist] has not yet been written. There is only speculation, and it has nothing to do with this.

It is also untrue that the "future affects the past." The correct statement is "the future reflects the past." If causality is real [and it certainly appears to be] it is not possible for the future to contain outcomes without causes. When you add to this that the total number of outcomes is very severely constrained by physical laws, it gives rise to the illusion that where things end up affects where they started. But it does not. They end up because, contrary to what the moron is saying in this article, quantum mechanics is FULLY CAUSAL. It is not deterministic, and it is probably not locally real on some scale [although there is actually still some controversy about this.] But it is a causal theory, and quantum fields and particles are quite real whether you observe them or not.

22 posted on 05/28/2015 6:52:08 PM PDT by FredZarguna (It looks just like a Telefunken U-47 -- with leather.)
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