Causal Reasoning in Physics
Mathias Frisch, University of Maryland
Abstract:
Many philosophers of physics maintain appear to believe that there is no room for substantive causal notions in our more mature theories of physics. In this paper I first critically examine several anti-causal arguments and then discuss two examples of causal reasoning in physics. The first example is a well-established part of mature physics: the derivations of both classical and quantum dispersion relations in scattering phenomena. The second example concerns a theory that currently is rather more speculative: the causal-set approach to quantum gravity.
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