Related papers: Causation & Physics
Quantum mechanics challenges our intuition on the cause-effect relations in nature. Some fundamental concepts, including Reichenbach's common cause principle or the notion of local realism, have to be reconsidered. Traditionally, this is…
The causal interpretation of quantum mechanics, as originally stated by deBroglie and Bohm, had several attractive features. Among these is the possibility that it could address some of the most fundamental questions on quantum phenomena.…
Bohr's interpretation of quantum mechanics has been criticized as incoherent and opportunistic, and based on doubtful philosophical premises. If so Bohr's influence, in the pre-war period of 1927-1939, is the harder to explain, and the…
Determining and measuring cause-effect relationships is fundamental to most scientific studies of natural phenomena. The notion of causation is distinctly different from correlation which only looks at association of trends or patterns in…
This short paper compiles the big ideas behind some philosophical views, definitions, and examples of causality. This collection spans the realms of the four commonly adopted approaches to causality: Humes regularity, counterfactual,…
Emergence and causality are two fundamental concepts for understanding complex systems. They are interconnected. On one hand, emergence refers to the phenomenon where macroscopic properties cannot be solely attributed to the cause of…
A new interpretation of quantum mechanics, similar to the Copenhagen interpretation, is developed from time-symmetry arguments and commonly held principles concerning time and causality. These principles, which are grounded in ideas outside…
The theory of causal fermion systems is a recent approach to fundamental physics. Giving quantum mechanics, general relativity and quantum field theory as limiting cases, it is a candidate for a unified physical theory. The dynamics is…
All physical process are subject to some laws which determine with math accurately its time-space evolution. These laws are described, in the last analysis for the principle of causality. The physical space can be homogeneous or…
A brief overview of some open questions in general relativity with important consequences for causality theory is presented, aiming to a better understanding of the causal structure of the spacetime. Special attention is accorded to the…
It is argued that there is no evidence for causality as a metaphysical relation in quantum phenomena. The assumption that there are no causal laws, but only probabilities for physical processes constrained by symmetries, leads naturally to…
In 1932, Fermi presented a two-atom model for determining whether quantum mechanics is consistent with causality, and concluded that indeed it is. In the late 1960's, Shirokov and others found that Fermi's approximations may not have been…
On 14 December 1900 Max Planck first formulated the idea of energy quanta related to a new universal constant now known as Planck's constant. Despite the following progress of thus initiated "quantum mechanics", the physical origin of both…
It has become increasingly apparent that a number of perplexing issues associated with the interpretation of quantum mechanics are more easily resolved once the notion of retrocausality is introduced. The aim here is to list and discuss…
In previous work with Joost Vennekens I proposed a definition of actual causation that is based on certain plausible principles, thereby allowing the debate on causation to shift away from its heavy focus on examples towards a more…
A fundamental physical principle that has consequences for the topology of space-time is the principle of Einstein-Weyl causality. We show here that this may have implications on quantum mechanics, as well. Borchers and Sen have rigorously…
The identification of causal relations is a cornerstone of the scientific method. Traditional approaches to this task are based on classical statistics. However, such classical approaches do not apply in the quantum domain, where a broader…
Using K-causal relation introduced by Sorkin and Woolgar [26], we gener- alize results of Garcia-Parrado and Senovilla [8, 9] on causal maps. We also introduce causality conditions with respect to K-causality which are analogous to those in…
This thesis is situated within the context of quantum gravity, broadly understood as any effort to explore the interplay between gravitation and the quantum realm, without necessarily requiring the quantization of the gravitational field…
Causal fermion systems are introduced as a general mathematical framework for formulating relativistic quantum theory. By specializing, we recover earlier notions like fermion systems in discrete space-time, the fermionic projector and…