Compare: communicating the property of the timer that it will ring one hour in the future (that is, timer works according to certain principles that result in it ringing in the future) vs. communicating from the future the fact that timer ringed. If you can run a precise physical simulation of a coin, you can predict how it’ll land. Usually, you can’t do that. Not every difficult-seeming prediction requires things like simulation of physical laws, abstractions can be very powerful as well.
Compare: communicating the property of the timer that it will ring one hour in the future (that is, timer works according to certain principles that result in it ringing in the future) vs. communicating from the future the fact that timer ringed. If you can run a precise physical simulation of a coin, you can predict how it’ll land. Usually, you can’t do that. Not every difficult-seeming prediction requires things like simulation of physical laws, abstractions can be very powerful as well.