Time, Causality, and the Quantum Theory Studies in the Philosophy of Science

Sebastian Sobkowiak

The article aims at presenting the relationship between science and philosophy based on the works of Werner Heisenberg. It deals with the infl uence of the scientifi c breakthrough on the understanding of physical concepts such as matter, time and causality. It also contains a discussion on the process of creating a new branch of science – quantum mechanics, and shows how the work and views of Heisenberg contributedto it. The relationship between physics and philosophy is presented here with particular emphasis on showing the results of research and philosophical refl ections on the concepts of matter, the philosophy of the language of science, the theory of unifi cation and the fl agship work of Heisenberg: the principle of uncertainty.

Henry Mehlberg, Robert S. Cohen

John F. Donoghue, Gabriel Menezes

In the philosophy of science, the origin of an arrow of time is viewed as problematic. We describe here how this arrow really follows from the causal structure of quantum physics. This connection is not really new -- it is just overlooked in most discussions of the arrow of time.

Henry Mehlberg

Giacomo Mauro D’Ariano, Giulio Chiribella, Paolo Perinotti

In this chapter we introduce the postulate of causality, and derive the mathematical structure of a causal OPT. We show how the present definition of causality is equivalent to the Einsteinian one, and argue that it is the only possible notion once it is stripped from its spurious deterministic connotation. In addition, the notion of causality used here is compliant with the historical philosophical concept since David Hume, and with the idea used in common reasoning, inference, and modeling in human sciences. In brief, the present notion of causality can be stated as the requirement of no signaling from the future . This is also the only requisite for an OPT in order to satisfy the principle of no signaling without interaction . In mathematical terms in an OPT the causality postulate is equivalent to the uniqueness of the deterministic effect, which in turn is equivalent to the ability to normalize states. The notion of causality is so naturally embedded in our understanding of reality that it often remains unconsciously implicit in foundational research, even in recent axiomatizations. Causality: From Cinderella to Principle Causality has been the object of a very extensive literature encompassing hundreds of books and technical articles in a wide spectrum of disciplines, ranging from pure philosophy to economics, law, natural sciences, and obviously, physics. Also due to its involvement in such heterogeneous blend of disciplines, causality has long been a vexed notion. Perhaps the most natural connection between concepts of causality in different branches of knowledge is the one at the borderline between physics and philosophy, since the early work of Aristotle, up to the cornerstone of Renée Descartes, who broke the ground for the modern view of David Hume and Immanuel Kant, through to contemporary works on physical causation. Causality has always remained in the realm of philosophy, staying only in the background of physics, without the status of a “law” or the rank of a “principle.” Most of the time causality creeps into physical theories in the form of ad hoc assumptions based on empirical evidences, as when we discard advanced potentials in electrodynamics or when we motivate the Kramers–Kronig relations. In other cases, causality is embodied in the “interpretation” of the theory, as for the Special Relativity of Einstein.

Thomas Pashby