Kiki,

Your hypothetical question was indeed cheeky, and therefore amusing. You don’t need to defend it, and I didn’t intend to attack it. But you’re getting enough answers which conform to your assumptions. I thought it might be amusing to answer with a ‘cheeky actual’ response.

Jorge Borges is a poet and a writer, not a scientist. I would not expect anyone to take him as an authority on the natural laws which govern the universe. His domain is the imagination, which only occasionally (and unreliably) intersects with reality.

You are correct, we do not really understand time, and cause-and-effect is placed on shaky ground by quantum physics, as well. Yet time indisputably has a direction for anything which moves at less than the speed of light. (Special Relativity tells us there is no time at all from the perspective of a photon, nor distance). There is no reason to doubt time’s direction for slow-movers like us — save in our imaginations, where constraints can be waved away on a whim.

Best wishes,

— Urgelt