What is a 'Cause,' and Why Does it Happen Before the Effect?
The physics of the time orientation of causation is more subtle than what it looks like superficially. For a long while it was reduced to a mere linguistic issue (a “cause” is just the term of a correlation that happens earlier, Hume). As emphasized by Russell, there is no time orientation in fundamental physics. But causation was later better understood as an essential notion in the context of an agent having choices, which after all is our own common context. This traces the time orientation of causation to the time orientation of agency.