# Can effect precede cause?
**URL:** https://boards.straightdope.com/t/can-effect-precede-cause/257348
**Category:** Factual Questions
**Created:** [July 28, 2004, 11:53pm UTC](https://boards.straightdope.com/t/can-effect-precede-cause/257348 "2004-07-28T23:53:50Z")
**Posts on this page:** 11
**Page:** 2
### Author:  [@chrisk](https://boards.straightdope.com/u/chrisk)
#### Post date: [July 29, 2004, 12:09pm UTC](https://boards.straightdope.com/t/can-effect-precede-cause/257348/21 "2004-07-29T12:09:34Z")
> [@Bewildebeest](#):
>
> See:
> Asimov, Isaac: _The Endochronic Properties of Resublimated Thiotimoline_, **Astounding Science Fiction** , 1948
Hehehe… yes, actually. The thiotimoline series of stories (‘Endrochronic properties’, ‘Micropsychiatric Applications’, ‘…And the space age’, ‘…To the stars’) are, in my mind, really a good object lesson of what a hash it makes out of the world around us to have an effect that literally precedes a cause, more so as the effect becomes more reliable. 🙂
I mean… peace bombs? (Was that what they were called in ‘space age’? Day-long thiotimoline batteries that had reliably signalled a positive and were then sealed into steel drums and buried ten feet deep on a mountain above a major city, thus in effect summoning a hurricane or similar storm capable of digging up the drum, breaking it, and exposing the battery to water?) Spaceships pulled along at faster than light speeds by thiotimoline cells chasing after water that was always just one second away from being released, like a donkey following a carrot dangling from a rod sticking forward from its own back?
:]
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### Author:  [@t-keela](https://boards.straightdope.com/u/t-keela)
#### Post date: [July 29, 2004, 12:24pm UTC](https://boards.straightdope.com/t/can-effect-precede-cause/257348/22 "2004-07-29T12:24:14Z")
Are you asking which came first…the chicken or the egg? Or perhaps what led up to the “big bang”?
Since the creation of the universe was an effect, what was its cause? Or was the bang the cause and the expansion/creation the effect. However, the bang itself was due to … here we go again. (chicken v. egg)
IIRC Hawking once theorized the effect preceded cause by example of an event horizon expanding prior to the arrival of new energy being absorbed by a black hole.
Maybe cause always precedes event is an absolute? I bet there’s plenty of folks who’d argue that there are no absolutes.
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### Author:  [@chrisk](https://boards.straightdope.com/u/chrisk)
#### Post date: [July 29, 2004, 12:27pm UTC](https://boards.straightdope.com/t/can-effect-precede-cause/257348/23 "2004-07-29T12:27:55Z")
> [@t-keela](#):
>
> Are you asking which came first…the chicken or the egg? Or perhaps what led up to the “big bang”?
>
> Since the creation of the universe was an effect, what was its cause? Or was the bang the cause and the expansion/creation the effect. However, the bang itself was due to … here we go again. (chicken v. egg)
> IIRC Hawking once theorized the effect preceded cause by example of an event horizon expanding prior to the arrival of new energy being absorbed by a black hole.
> Maybe cause always precedes event is an absolute? I bet there’s plenty of folks who’d argue that there are no absolutes.
To me, the question of effects BEFORE causes is one thing. When you get into the big bang/creation of everything, you also have to let in one other interesting question:
Can there be a effect which has NO cause? 😉
And that’s a whole 'nother barrel of monkeys 😃
PS: Thank Og I ‘previewed’ that post – first time through I reversed the big question so it was asking about a cause that had no effect… another interesting question, but not the one that’s really relevant to big bang-ness. :smack:
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### Author:  [@Grimpen](https://boards.straightdope.com/u/Grimpen)
#### Post date: [July 29, 2004, 1:50pm UTC](https://boards.straightdope.com/t/can-effect-precede-cause/257348/24 "2004-07-29T13:50:55Z")
> [@Lumpy](#):
>
> It’s been suggested that quantum wave reduction is actually like running a time-paradox backwards: …
Just to be difficult… Larry Niven wrote an article once poking at the difficulty of even talking about time travel in a language which (as Terry Pratchett says) was devised by apes to tell other apes where the ripe fruit is.
That is, if you posit time loops (for example): what exactly is meant by “before”? You’d need a whole set of terms: “chronologically before” within the original time-line; “causally before” (in which an event that triggers a time loop would be “before” the rest of the time loop, including chronologically prior elements); etc… We collapse this whole (hypothetical) vocabulary into “before”. But that collapsed term is in itself an artifact of a perceived coordinate system in which cause always precedes effect.
So perhaps one could ask the question this way: what evidence is there for events which do not satisfy our assumptions about cause and effect? (Such as the quantum split experiments, which are indeed weird.) And how would we talk about them?
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### Author:  [@ralph124c](https://boards.straightdope.com/u/ralph124c)
#### Post date: [July 29, 2004, 2:25pm UTC](https://boards.straightdope.com/t/can-effect-precede-cause/257348/25 "2004-07-29T14:25:24Z")
If effect preceded cause, then we wouldlive in a totally random world. Nothing would makes sense, and no valid theories (like physics or chemistry) could ever be developed. There would be no science or logic, because these things could NEVER provide an explanation for the observed, physical world.
So, in short, NO…for the reasons above, this can never happen.
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### Author:  [@Squink](https://boards.straightdope.com/u/Squink)
#### Post date: [July 29, 2004, 3:01pm UTC](https://boards.straightdope.com/t/can-effect-precede-cause/257348/26 "2004-07-29T15:01:11Z")
> [@ralph124c](#):
>
> If effect preceded cause, then we would live in a totally random world. Nothing would makes sense, and no valid theories (like physics or chemistry) could ever be developed.
Not at all. If the normal relation between cause and effect gets swapped under some sets of circumstances, we can list those circumstances, and take them into account when developing a theoretical description of the world. Catywumpus is _not_ the same as random.
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### Author:  [@Loopydude](https://boards.straightdope.com/u/Loopydude)
#### Post date: [July 29, 2004, 4:01pm UTC](https://boards.straightdope.com/t/can-effect-precede-cause/257348/27 "2004-07-29T16:01:21Z")
It’s not clear to me what about “the collapse of the wavefunction” (a phenomenon which, BTW, is proposed in certain interpretations of quantum theory, but not all of them) violates causality. It certainly violates _locality_, but that sort of violation proposes a kind of “instantanious action at a distance”, which, while non-local, is not acausal.
In other words, the wavefunction collapses because you observe the system. It does not collapse before you observe the system; or, even if it did, you wouldn’t know it, because you’re not looking at it. Since all you can know is what you observe, what the wavefunction is up to when unobserved is not really open to investigation. The best assumption is a superposition of all possible states, which collapses to one state when, and only when, something interacts with the system. That this collapse takes place in all points in spacetime instantaneously is certainly weird, but not, I would say, in violation of causality.
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### Author:  [@AHunter3](https://boards.straightdope.com/u/AHunter3)
#### Post date: [July 29, 2004, 4:36pm UTC](https://boards.straightdope.com/t/can-effect-precede-cause/257348/28 "2004-07-29T16:36:46Z")
Consider how causality is usually established!
a) Experimental version – Hypothesis is that A causes B, falsifiable = when A sometimes no B. In experimental environment, introduce A, test for B, with control environment in which no A exists and is not introduced, test for B. Results of B existing whenever A is introduced, but not (necessarily) in cases where A was not introduced = causality effectively established.
b) Inferential version – Same hypothesis and falsifiable counter, but actually introducing variable A is problematic (e.g., hypothesis that sexual abuse in childhood causes self-mutilating behaviors in youth & adulthood) so instead, in data set with variables A and B, divide data set into cases with A and cases without A, control for effects on B by other measured factors, study impact of A on value of B. To control for ordinality of factors, set B to null if A exists but does not precede B. Result of rate of B where A is present approaches 100% = causality effectively established.
Now, if effects can precede causes, all this goes out the window! A lead plate is inserted or removed from between an xray source and photographic film stored in opaque plastic. Our conclusion that xrays pass through opaque plastic and fog the film but are blocked by the lead plate depend heavily on the logic that causes precede effects. How would you rule out the possibility that film being fogged causes xrays to have streamed from the xray source, and simultaneously stimulates the experimenter to have already lifted the lead plate out of the way?
What _is_ true, I think, is that a lot of cause-and-effect patterns are better (or alternatively, at least) understood as an integrated phenomenon, as with Alan Watts and his allegory of the cat entering the room – the appearance of the head of the cat is not the cause of the subsequent appearance of the tail of the cat so much as the entire cat exists, intrinsically manifested as cat head and as cat tail (among other things feline). That is, we divide phenomena up into subphenomena and then describe how one part causes the part that comes after, which is not intrinsically a “better” or “more accurate” way of seeing it than comprehending the larger phenomenon as a whole. Including, ultimately, the possible understanding of the entirety of spacetime as a single event, the only event, an event that has neither cause nor effect and simply _is_.
But to the extent that “cause” and “effect” are useful notions, they are useful notions for us in the context of a one-way flow of time in which causes come first and effects, caused _by_ them, follow.
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### Author:  [@Omphaloskeptic](https://boards.straightdope.com/u/Omphaloskeptic)
#### Post date: [July 29, 2004, 9:58pm UTC](https://boards.straightdope.com/t/can-effect-precede-cause/257348/29 "2004-07-29T21:58:14Z")
> [@Loopydude](#):
>
> It’s not clear to me what about “the collapse of the wavefunction” (a phenomenon which, BTW, is proposed in certain interpretations of quantum theory, but not all of them) violates causality. It certainly violates _locality_, but that sort of violation proposes a kind of “instantanious action at a distance”, which, while non-local, is not acausal.
I’m not sure if you’re referring to my post or not. I didn’t mean to imply that wavefunction collapse violates causality (where by a “causality violation” I mean transmission of information outside the forward light cone); I would emphatically say that the wavefunction collapse does not violate causality. I was trying to give an example of a more general “effect” which can propagate outside the forward light cone, so that according to some observers the “effect” (the wavefunction collapse) can happen before its “cause” (the observation). This effect cannot transmit information, but it can be observed by making measurements and comparing correlations at a later time.
This is not quite so strange as it may seem. Suppose I have two envelopes, each containing half of a dollar bill (but I don’t know which half is in which envelope), and I send one to Alpha Centauri. Then by opening my envelope I **instantaneously** know what is in the other envelope, even though results of a direct measurement would take 4 years to arrive. The difference in quantum mechanics is that the correlations can be stronger and weirder than this.
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### Author:  [@BaldTaco](https://boards.straightdope.com/u/BaldTaco)
#### Post date: [July 30, 2004, 10:50pm UTC](https://boards.straightdope.com/t/can-effect-precede-cause/257348/30 "2004-07-30T22:50:21Z")
> [@](#):
>
> Suppose I have two envelopes, each containing half of a dollar bill…
In this example, the information travels from your envelope to you, and you deduce the contents of the other envelope. No information is travelling from Alpha Centauri.
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### Author:  [@Loopydude](https://boards.straightdope.com/u/Loopydude)
#### Post date: [July 30, 2004, 11:02pm UTC](https://boards.straightdope.com/t/can-effect-precede-cause/257348/31 "2004-07-30T23:02:58Z")
It’s even worse: Recent tests of Bell’s Inequality (the most famous being the Aspect Experiment) have shown that the system isn’t like two halves of a dollar bill. It’s more like you have this special, quantum dollar that has a right half, and a left half, but the two halves have neither identity _until you look at them_. Then one instantaneously “decides” to be the left half, and the other, instantaneously and at that very time (to the limit of our ability to measure), decides to be the right half, even though it’s a billion light years away.
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