In that case, if we felt that physics had left out of its representation a central datum about the world—the asymmetry of causation—then we might be entitled to ask for a better physics. The world is not a number, nor an equation. It is a concrete particular inhabited by physical objects and some of them appear to be causally related to others. Physics sometimes forces us to rethink and revise common sense, which may be perfectly legitimate. But it should not follow automatically that because a theory works out mathematically, within a model, the world is exactly like that model or like the
...more
