h2g2 The Hitchhiker's Guide to the Galaxy: Earth Edition

<...by means that fall outside the normally accepted operations of cause and effect.>

Totally off-topic, which is why I posted here, isn't it true that cause and effect is at least partly discredited? I believe there is some aspect of paired photons in a thought experiment where the effect happens before the cause.... I think I read about this in Robert Anton Wilson's "Quantum psychology".

Pattern-chaser

"Who cares, wins"

I'm not at all sure that proving an effect happens before a cause by means of a thought experiment is even logically possible, because with reversible physical laws (most of them), it's which comes first that *establishes* which is cause and which effect. This is not to say that there aren't some things going on down in the quantum world that do not appear to conform to accepted notions of cause and effect, most notably the Bell Aspect experiments that appear to show that there are nonlocal causes and effects. I don't claim to understand this, but the sort of statistical results obtained remind me of this:- F19585?thread=550304 But you'd need to ask someone better informed and/or smarter than me as to whether there's a connection.

Noggin