Article
Article
Causality
Article By:
Shapere, Dudley Department of History, Wake Forest University, Winston-Salem, North Carolina.
Last reviewed:January 2020
DOI:https://doi.org/10.1036/1097-8542.114600
In physics, the requirement that interactions in any spacetime region can influence the evolution of the system only at subsequent times; that is, past events are causes of future events, and future events can never be the causes of events in the past. Causality thus depends on time orientability, the possibility of distinguishing past from future. Not all spacetimes are orientable.
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