Outside of physics, the future influences the past all the time, though.
Imagine that you are in Stalinist Russia and win a minor scientific prize for a paper you wrote. There is a purge, and while you manage to not get deported to Siberia, the prize is reassigned to a less brilliant but more politically orthodox colleague, to the point that he is listed as first author of your paper.
He goes on to have a better career because of this paper, and by the end of the affair, nobody remembers that you wrote the paper to begin with.
If all observable effects of an events have been retconned, can that event be said to have occured?
Can a similar situation happen in physics, and if so, does it "count" if only macroscopic effects are reversed? (To keep with the analogy, in this case, everything but your memory has been changed, but your memory hasn't been - although it might over time, due to you wanting to avoid cognitive dissonance).
Imagine that you are in Stalinist Russia and win a minor scientific prize for a paper you wrote. There is a purge, and while you manage to not get deported to Siberia, the prize is reassigned to a less brilliant but more politically orthodox colleague, to the point that he is listed as first author of your paper.
He goes on to have a better career because of this paper, and by the end of the affair, nobody remembers that you wrote the paper to begin with.
If all observable effects of an events have been retconned, can that event be said to have occured?
Can a similar situation happen in physics, and if so, does it "count" if only macroscopic effects are reversed? (To keep with the analogy, in this case, everything but your memory has been changed, but your memory hasn't been - although it might over time, due to you wanting to avoid cognitive dissonance).