Why has no one tried looking the other direction? Just as the present moment may *lead* to a large number of possible futures, it may also have *originated* from a large number of possible pasts. The further into the past you look, the more uncertain you become about what it actually was.
Hm. Bit of a bastardization of the normal terminology - in relativity, we talk about a "past light cone", but that's a rather different beast.
To answer your question - the reason this is not generally done is that the Universe is known to not be symmetric under time-reversal. Time's Arrow only points in one direction, which implies that how things unfold in the forward direction is not the same as in the backwards one.
Especially on the human scale, one must be very careful not to confuse what is plausible given only limited information, and what could, in reality, actually have resulted in our current state. We suppose that maybe it would not have mattered if there were warheads in Cuba, but that is merely a guess. It is also just as likely that this was one of the details that was pivotal in deciding how particular individuals behaved, thus being formative in the sequence of events.
Basically, there can be a very big difference between, "I don't know what happened," and, "It does not matter what happened." When considering the course of human events, we shoud not mistake the two.
no subject
Hm. Bit of a bastardization of the normal terminology - in relativity, we talk about a "past light cone", but that's a rather different beast.
To answer your question - the reason this is not generally done is that the Universe is known to not be symmetric under time-reversal. Time's Arrow only points in one direction, which implies that how things unfold in the forward direction is not the same as in the backwards one.
Especially on the human scale, one must be very careful not to confuse what is plausible given only limited information, and what could, in reality, actually have resulted in our current state. We suppose that maybe it would not have mattered if there were warheads in Cuba, but that is merely a guess. It is also just as likely that this was one of the details that was pivotal in deciding how particular individuals behaved, thus being formative in the sequence of events.
Basically, there can be a very big difference between, "I don't know what happened," and, "It does not matter what happened." When considering the course of human events, we shoud not mistake the two.