Locality and the Common Cause Principle

Gabor Szabó (Hungarian Academy of Sciences)

Faculty of Philosophy (Philosophical Society room - 2nd floor), University of Belgrade

Gábor Szabó

Institute of Philosophy

Research Center for the Humanities

Hungarian Academy of Sciences

         Locality and the Common Cause Principle

Reichenbach's Common Cause Principle claims that correlations between
causally non-related events should be traced back to a common cause which is usually characterized probabilistically and localized spatiotemporally. But what is the exact relation between the probabilistic characterization and spatiotemporal localization? Intuitively, common causes should be accommodated in the strong past, that is in the intersection of the causal past of the correlating events, but the axiomatics of algebraic quantum field theory, for example, seems to suggest that they should be in a broader region: in the weak past, that is in the union of the causal pasts. How these localizations relate to each other in the classical and in the quantum theory, and how they relate to Bell's notion of local causality characterized in probabilistic terms---these are the questions the paper is addressing.

Slobodan Perovic [email protected]