(March 14, 2014 at 1:02 pm)Alex K Wrote:(March 14, 2014 at 12:59 pm)Pickup_shonuff Wrote: So my broader question is then, if we were to "rewind the tape," and pause it at some exact point between now and the Big Bang, at the point we paused it, granting nothing is different from the actual past, would the present roll out precisely the way it has? Where is the space for variant outcomes?
An obvious example is the time at which individual nuclear decays happen. This is not something that is even in principle determined in the context of ordinary quantum theory. Two particles scattering off each other will emerge at random directions distributed according to their outgoing wave functions (think double slit experiment)
http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Scattering_theory
this will almost immediately lead to completely different outcome if you rewind the clock and start over with the same quantum state.
Will it? Are you sure that randomness isn't really a manifestation of hidden variables? How do you know that unpredictability is true temporal randomness?
