“There are some configurations of the future that don’t correspond to anything in the past,” Cotler said. “There’s nothing in the past that would evolve into them.”
Giddings has proposed a similar principle for ruling out paradoxical states he encountered while studying black holes last year. He calls it “history matters,” and it holds that a given state of the universe is only physically possible if it can evolve backward without generating contradictions. “This has been kind of a lingering puzzle,” he said. Strominger and Cotler “are taking that puzzle and using it to try to motivate possibly a new way of thinking about things.”
Giddings thinks the approach deserves further
→ Continue reading at Wired - Science