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To: fortheDeclaration
Causality presupposes an effect and the Universe was either uncaused (always existed) or is the effect of something else.

You're talking out of your hat. Cause and effect necessarily take place in a specified time sequence, which doesn't necessarily apply before the Big Bang. (Nothing is south of the south pole.)

Moreover, there are events that occur in real time that are demonstrably uncaused. Subatomic decays are a whole class of examples. If they were caused by some undiscovered mechanism, pairs of decays would have to obey Bell's inequality. (Look it up if you're unfamiliar with it.) But it's an irreducible experimental fact that some decays violate Bell's inequality.

So either the events are uncaused, or there is some sort of faster-than-light signal that causes the Einstein-Podolsky-Rosen correlations that violate the inequality. But faster-than-light signals ipso facto violate causality: if two events have a spacelike separation, the order of the events is frame-dependent (i.e., you can always find a physical frame in which the effect precedes the cause).

The mere existence of EPR correlations is an experimental proof that cause-and-effect cannot be universal.

122 posted on 02/24/2005 7:37:08 PM PST by Physicist
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To: Physicist
Did the Universe have a beginning or not?

If it did, then it is an effect of something (of God, or the Big Bang etc)

124 posted on 02/25/2005 12:28:35 AM PST by fortheDeclaration
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