Back in Time and the Physical Fantasies We Love

This article begins the proposal of a model that seeks to address the epistemological questions raised in previous articles. It applies the distinction — established in the first article of this series and developed in subsequent ones — between the abstract mathematical equation and the qualified equation with the limits of its empirical confirmation to four "fantasies" of contemporary physics: singularities (Big Bang, black holes), information loss (Hawking's paradox), temporal reversibility (time travel), and the mystery of renormalization (infinities of quantum electrodynamics). We demonstrate that these fantasies arise from a systematic confusion between what mathematics allows and what observation confirms. We argue that the unrecorded past is unobservable and irrecoverable, and that the so-called "conservation of information" is a mathematical artifact, not a physical law. The time variable possesses an implicit negative limit — the moment from which we have a record. Physical equations describe current relations, not histories. Singularities — where equations diverge to infinity — are symptoms of the extrapolation of equations beyond their empirical domain, not characteristics of nature. The article concludes with a reflection on the emotional attachment that physicists have developed to these narratives and the courage necessary to abandon the fantasies we love.