Maybe not (or may be, I suppose) what parent was referring to, but consider the following possibility:<p>&quot;People assume that time is a strict progression of cause to effect, but actually, from a nonlinear, nonsubjective viewpoint it&#x27;s more like a big ball of wibbly-wobbly, timey-wimey... stuff.&quot; -- The Doctor [1]<p>To be a bit more serious, causality in general is (by some accounts) an open philosophical problem. That is, there&#x27;s no generally accepted proof (and not even really a concept of what would prove or disprove) that causality actually <i>exists</i> as an independent rule&#x2F;law&#x2F;standard&#x2F;phenomenon, as opposed to being an abstraction of correlation that we made up to reason about our decisions [2]. For all we know it may be that an effect without a cause violates merely our intuitions, not the laws of nature.<p>[1] <i>Doctor Who S03E10</i> - <i>Blink</i><p>[2] <a href="http:&#x2F;&#x2F;www.iep.utm.edu&#x2F;hume-cau&#x2F;" rel="nofollow">http:&#x2F;&#x2F;www.iep.utm.edu&#x2F;hume-cau&#x2F;</a>