Related papers: Is There Causation in Fundamental Physics? New Ins…

Correlation is not causation. As simple as this widely agreed-upon statement may seem, scientifically defining causality and using it to drive our modern biomedical research is immensely challenging. In this perspective, we attempt to…

Symmetries are widely used in modeling quantum systems but they do not contribute in postulates of quantum mechanics. Here we argue that logical, mathematical, and observational evidence require that symmetry should be considered as a…

Causality never gained the status of a "law" or "principle" in physics. Some recent literature even popularized the false idea that causality is a notion that should be banned from theory. Such misconception relies on an alleged…

Causality is a seminal concept in science: Any research discipline, from sociology and medicine to physics and chemistry, aims at understanding the causes that could explain the correlations observed among some measured variables. While…

The theory of causal fermion systems is an approach to describe fundamental physics. Giving quantum mechanics, general relativity and quantum field theory as limiting cases, it is a candidate for a unified physical theory. We here give a…

Computational models typically assume that operations are applied in a fixed sequential order. In recent years several works have looked at relaxing this assumption, considering computations without any fixed causal structure and showing…

Since Bell's theorem, it is known that the concept of local realism fails to explain quantum phenomena. Indeed, the violation of a Bell inequality has become a synonym of the incompatibility of quantum theory with our classical notion of…

The quantum switch, the canonical example of a process with indefinite causal order, has been claimed to provide various advantages over processes with definite causal orders for some particular tasks in the field of quantum metrology. In…

In a conventional circuit for quantum machine learning, the quantum gates used to encode the input parameters and the variational parameters are constructed with a fixed order. The resulting output function, which can be expressed in the…

We develop rigorous notions of causality and causal separability in the process framework introduced in [Oreshkov, Costa, Brukner, Nat. Commun. 3, 1092 (2012)], which describes correlations between separate local experiments without a prior…

Reichenbach's principle asserts that if two observed variables are found to be correlated, then there should be a causal explanation of these correlations. Furthermore, if the explanation is in terms of a common cause, then the conditional…

While the standard formulation of quantum theory assumes a fixed background causal structure, one can relax this assumption within the so-called process matrix framework. Remarkably, some processes, termed causally nonseparable, are…

Intervention theories of causality define a relationship as causal if appropriately specified interventions to manipulate a putative cause tend to produce changes in the putative effect. Interventionist causal theories are commonly…

The causal set approach to quantum gravity is based on the hypothesis that the underlying structure of spacetime is that of a random partial order. We survey some of the interesting mathematics that has arisen in connection with the causal…

The standard formulation of quantum theory assumes a predefined notion of time. This is a major obstacle in the search for a quantum theory of gravity, where the causal structure of space-time is expected to be dynamical and fundamentally…

Causality is a fundamental part of the scientific endeavour to understand the world. Unfortunately, causality is still taboo in much of psychology and social science. Motivated by a growing number of recommendations for the importance of…

The problem of using observed correlations to infer causal relations is relevant to a wide variety of scientific disciplines. Yet given correlations between just two classical variables, it is impossible to determine whether they arose from…

The class of problems in causal inference which seeks to isolate causal correlations solely from observational data even without interventions has come to the forefront of machine learning, neuroscience and social sciences. As new large…

We introduce a formalism for the evaluation of counterfactual queries in the framework of quantum causal models, generalising Pearl's semantics for counterfactuals in classical causal models, thus completing the last rung in the quantum…

We discuss the notion of causality in Quantum Gravity in the context of sum-over-histories approaches, in the absence therefore of any background time parameter. In the spin foam formulation of Quantum Gravity, we identify the appropriate…