Einstein, causation, and the future
by Josh Staiger
This evening, I was reading some of Albert Einstein's essays from the book, Ideas and Opinions.
For some reason the following quote from the essay, The Religious Spirit of Science really struck me:
"...the scientist is possessed by the sense of universal causation. The future, to him, is every whit as necessary and determined as the past."
Though I have thought about this idea intuitively many times before, I don't believe that I have ever seen the future compared to the past as directly as in this case.
For me, this evokes an image of a steady stream of states of the universe - the past states being no different from the future states, except for they are separated by a single point on this line that we call this moment.
This is a very Zen idea when I think about it, though I never really made the connection until I thought about the past and present in this context.