Related papers: Causation & Physics
According to Schopenhauer, Kant's arguments about the transcendental ideality of space and time can be extended to matter through the concept of causality and the principle of sufficient reason. In this article, I examine to what extent…
The representations of the world around in physics built with help of causality are analyzed and seems incomplete. The observer's causal representations form a closed logical system, i.e. the compact group related to cause-effect chains.…
The causal set approach to quantum gravity embodies the concepts of causality and discreteness. This article explores some foundational and conceptual issues within causal set theory.
We discuss a number of comments on quant-ph/9801061, and propose to introduce the concept of 'Causal Indistinguishability'. The incompatibility between Quantum Mechanics and Nonlocal Causality appears to be unavoidable: upholding of Quantum…
We investigate the structure common to causal theories that attempt to explain a (part of) the world. Causality implies conservation of identity, itself a far from simple notion. It imposes strong demands on the universalizing power of the…
It is often claimed that one cannot locate a notion of causation in fundamental physical theories. The reason most commonly given is that the dynamics of those theories do not support any distinction between the past and the future, and…
This work outlines the novel application of the empirical analysis of causation, presented by Kutach, to the study of information theory and its role in physics. The central thesis of this paper is that causation and information are…
Quantum mechanics forces us to reconsider certain aspects of classical causality. The 'central mystery' of quantum mechanics manifests in different ways, depending on the interpretation. This mystery can be formulated as the possibility of…
The conceptual definition and understanding of the nature of time, both qualitatively and quantitatively is of the utmost difficulty and importance, and plays a fundamental role in physics. Physical systems seem to evolve in paths of…
Certain approaches to quantum gravity, such as the one based on the concept of purely virtual particles (fakeons), sacrifice the cause-effect relation at very small scales to reconcile renormalizability with unitarity. Other developments…
We still lack any consensus about what one is actually talking about as one uses quantum mechanics. There is a gap between the abstract terms in which the theory is couched and the phenomena the theory enables each of us to account for so…
A mathematical definition of classical causality over discrete spacetime dynamics is formulated. The approach is background free and permits a definition of causality in a precise way whenever the spacetime dynamics permits. It gives a…
The ideas of spacetime discreteness and causality are important in several of the popular approaches to quantum gravity. But if discreteness is accepted as an initial assumption, conflict with Lorentz invariance can be a consequence. The…
Reasoning about actual causes of observed effects is fundamental to the study of rationality. This important problem has been studied since the time of Aristotle, with formal mathematical accounts emerging recently. We live in a world where…
The Hilbert space formalism describes causality as a statistical relation between initial experimental conditions and final measurement outcomes, expressed by the inner products of state vectors representing these conditions. This…
We propose a test of the principle of relativity, involving quantum signals between two inertial frames. If the principle is upheld, classical causality will appear to be split in a dramatic and emphatic way. We discuss the existence of…
In a causal world the direction of the time arrow dictates how past causal events in a variable $X$ produce future effects in $Y$. $X$ is said to cause an effect in $Y$, if the predictability (uncertainty) about the future states of $Y$…
The basic physical problems that necessitated the emergence of quantum physics are summarized, along with the elements of wave mechanics and its traditional statistical interpretation. Alternative interpretations to the statistical one,…
We start from the well-known form of the interval of the special relativity, stare it, and build up an attempt to implement the causality from it. Some features appear to be new, they involve the mass of the particle and the structure of…
In this short review, we explain how and in which sense the causal action principle for causal fermion systems gives rise to classical gravity and the Einstein equations. Moreover, methods are presented for going beyond classical gravity,…