Causation in Physics

It follows from the existence of successful physical theories that violate the principle either that we have yet to find the correct principle of causality or that there is no such principle that constitutes a universal causal constraint. In analogy to the case of the determinism challenge, one can resist the conclusion of the argument by denying premise 1 and maintain that causal constraints can play a legitimate and useful role in physical theorizing even if they are not part of a universal principle of causality. 2. Causal notions can, if at all, only be legitimately employed in contexts in which we can isolate a small set of factors of interest as those responsible for the occurrence of an event-the dominant cause or causes-by drawing a distinction between causes and background conditions. First, according to the most promising accounts of causation, causes act deterministically: a complete set of causes determines its effects. Yet if quantum mechanics were cited as reason for the failure of a principle of causality, one can try to rescue the principle by introducing a notion of probabilistic causation: causes do not determine their effects but determine the probabilities of an effect’s occurrence. Newtonian gravitational theory violates both types of constraint, but rigid body mechanics violates only the finite-speed constraint while action-at-a-distance versions of classical electrodynamics (that posit particles but not fields) satisfy the finite speed constraint but posit propagation of electromagnetic influences across spatio-temporal gaps.

According to the second type of constraint causal influences do not propagate infinitely fast. In the second horn, since the imposition of the causal framework makes no difference to the factual content of the sciences, it is revealed as an empty honorific. Thus structural model accounts may provide an appropriate framework to support the claim that causal inferences and judgments play an important role in physics. If causes determine their effects, nothing short of the complete state on S will classify as the cause or the set of causes of E. This leaves three options, all of which may seem unpalatable for a defender of causation in physics. That is, true causal regularities of the form "whenever S is instantiated E will occur" will be instantiated at most once. Similarly, we might ask if hitting one of the balls with a hammer exactly as they collide will result in changes to the balls’ motion after they collide or before they collide. Many paradigmatically causal claims relate one cause (or at most a very small set of causal factors) to an effect. Within the functional project, the reply could concede that focusing on a small set of causal factors fulfills certain pragmatic and context dependent roles yet maintain that these are not the only functions of causal concepts and causal judgements and that there are other functions that are compatible with-or even require-a broader notion of what counts as an event’s causes.

Or, finally, we concede that whatever considerations allow us to single out a small set of factors come from outside of physics. This claim might be supported by pointing out that causal claims are used to assign responsibility or blame, to single out factors that are particularly amenable to interventions into a system and for control, 6 hole billiard table price or to single out factors that we may find particularly salient in a given context-functions that all appear to require zeroing in on only a small number of dominant factors as an event’s causes. Farr and Reutlinger (2013) point out that this can be made precise in two logically independent ways and that we have to distinguish the claim (i) that the laws are both future and past deterministic from the claim (ii) that the laws are time-reversal invariant. Instead researchers inferred the black-hole event from the two signals detected locally in the LIGO detectors in Washington and Louisiana, arguing that the extremely strong correlations between the signals detected at both detectors simultaneously are evidence for the colliding black holes as the signals’ common cause.

According to many conceptions of causation, causes are local in various senses: First, causes are synchronically local: they are "smallish," spatially localized events-or at least their size is proportionate to the size of the effect under consideration. First, knowledge of causal structures allows us to identify relationships amenable to manipulation and control; and second, common cause reasoning enables us to draw inferences from one time to another even when we possess only incomplete knowledge of the state of a system on an initial or final value surface. And how is the asymmetry related to the causal asymmetry, on the one hand, and the thermodynamic asymmetry, on the other? And one can argue that conditions constraining the allowable force functions in Newton’s law, such as the Lipschitz condition, are an integral part of the content of Newtonian physics. The laws of classical electrodynamics, the Maxwell-Lorentz equations, imply a wave equation, which is a time-reversal invariant hyperbolic equation of motion and is standardly solved using the Green’s functions formalism.