What does "genuine prediction" mean? (imported)

[Catlady (Rita Prince Winston)]

--- In the_old_crowd at yahoogroups.com, "pippin_999" <foxmoth at q...> 
wrote:
> 
> Firenze said that "trivial hurts, tiny human accidents" are of no 
> more significance to the wide universe than the scurryings of 
> ants. (I guess he's not into chaos theory.) He says that the skies 
> foretell only "great tides of evil or change." 

He's a centaur -- I am not convinced that he's right. Maybe only 
humans can read human information in the stars. Or if the stars, so 
vast and distant, only indicate vast events, that doesn't mean that 
tea leaves, so close and trivial, don't foretell close and trivial 
events.

Anyway, probably JKR put that in to prevent people from thinking she 
endorsed astrology.
> 
> This stuff is almost as squirrely as time travel,

And for the same reason: it deals with the mystery of time. (There 
is a lovely sentence on the subject in Martin Gardner's WHYS OF A 
PHILOSOPHICAL SCRIVENER that I'm too lazy to go to the other room 
to search for).

However, I don't have the mind to understand physics, but when the 
physicists say that time is a dimension (also when they deny that 
simultaneity has any meaning as a concept), aren't they upholding 
the 'predestination' side of the debate: that the 'future' already 
exists, we just haven't been there yet (how annoying that even my 
attempt to explain a non-time-living concept uses time-living words 
like 'yet'!).