[Time Travel by Steve Hester]

On Real Numbers, Free Will and Open Future

Is there a necessary natural order that links all phenomena in a series of causal chains, so that the future is already determined in the smallest details by the conditions that precede it? Does time really flow, or is it just a tenacious illusion, as Einstein thought? Are we free to choose between different futures, or do we delude ourselves that we have free will? These are the issues addressed by the Swiss physicist Nicolas Gisin in a series of articles published recently in some of the major scientific journals

”La liberté est un mystère” — Nicholas Malebranche

The great capacity demonstrated by Newtonian mechanics to predict the motion of celestial bodies provided 18th-century philosophers and scientists the theoretical foothold on which to build the vision of a mechanical, material Universe, governed exclusively by cause and effect relationships between physical objects. In such a view of the cosmos, every event is the necessary consequence of pre-existing…