Dear all,
Let me resume the question of known or uncertain future. With me, perhaps anyone except of believers will share the point of view uttered by Shannon: The past is knowable, in principle, but absolutely unchangeable while the future is changeable, in principle, but its prediction is always uncertain.
Believers like Einstein and Petkov are denying this. It does not matter whether they believe in a religion, a fate (destiny) or merely a deeply hidden comprehensive order of anything. They do not consider future as merely predicted possibilities but as something a priori given and merely not yet known.
I argue: On the level of abstract relations, a distinction between the past and the future is indeed inappropriate. However, you and me do not observe the world
from outside. We live in it and are bound to the very moment. The same is true for any process in reality.
Petkov claims: "The very essence of the art of doing physics is to identify which theoretical concepts in our theories have counterparts in the external world."
While he admits that theories are not the real world, the word external indicates his point of view. Theorists like he feel outside reality. They do not consider their concepts like mere tools but like an independent world of theory.
This perversion might be an almost necessary result of the exclusively abstract style of teaching at universities. Because my humble own vote does not have sufficient wight, I remind of Galilei, Gold, and Ren having provided factual votes for ultimate reality, i.e., for considering theory only a reflection, a shadow of reality. Theory must obey reality, not the other was round.
The search for counterparts in reality seems to be rather helpless in cases like aleph_2, bad ghosts, Higgs boson, SUSY, quantum computers, a genuine traveling wave in cochlea, anti-worlds, etc. In case of problems with identification I recommend to look for possibly fundamental mistakes.
Absurd putative T-symmetry in the sense f(t) = f(-t) is definitely just an artifact due to improper interpretation of complex domain, which on its part necessarily arose from the notion of time believed to be given with a range from eternity to eternity. Please check it: Reality ends at the now. While one can try to predict, prepare, or construct future, future processes cannot be observed in advance. The idea of arbitrarily moving "in" time is as unfounded and futile as are transfinite numbers.
Hopefully this helps,
Eckard