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Causality (physics)
Physical causality is a physical relationship between causes and effects.[1][2] It is considered to be
fundamental to all natural sciences and behavioural sciences, especially physics. Causality is also a topic
studied from the perspectives of philosophy, statistics and logic. Causality means that an effect can not
occur from a cause that is not in the back (past) light cone of that event. Similarly, a cause can not have an
effect outside its front (future) light cone.

As a physical concept
In classical physics, an effect cannot occur before its cause which is why solutions such as the advanced
time solutions of the Liénard–Wiechert potential are discarded as physically meaningless. In both Einstein's
theory of special and general relativity, causality means that an effect cannot occur from a cause that is not
in the back (past) light cone of that event. Similarly, a cause cannot have an effect outside its front (future)
light cone. These restrictions are consistent with the constraint that mass and energy that act as causal
influences cannot travel faster than the speed of light and/or backwards in time. In quantum field theory,
observables of events with a spacelike relationship, "elsewhere", have to commute, so the order of
observations or measurements of such observables do not impact each other.

Another requirement of causality is that cause and effect be mediated across space and time (requirement of
contiguity). This requirement has been very influential in the past, in the first place as a result of direct
observation of causal processes (like pushing a cart), in the second place as a problematic aspect of
Newton's theory of gravitation (attraction of the earth by the sun by means of action at a distance) replacing
mechanistic proposals like Descartes' vortex theory; in the third place as an incentive to develop dynamic
field theories (e.g., Maxwell's electrodynamics and Einstein's general theory of relativity) restoring
contiguity in the transmission of influences in a more successful way than in Descartes' theory.

In modern physics, the notion of causality had to be clarified. The word simultaneous is observer-
dependent in special relativity.[3] The principle is relativity of simultaneity. Consequently, the relativistic
principle of causality says that the cause must precede its effect according to all inertial observers. This is
equivalent to the statement that the cause and its effect are separated by a timelike interval, and the effect
belongs to the future of its cause. If a timelike interval separates the two events, this means that a signal
could be sent between them at less than the speed of light. On the other hand, if signals could move faster
than the speed of light, this would violate causality because it would allow a signal to be sent across
spacelike intervals, which means that at least to some inertial observers the signal would travel backward in
time. For this reason, special relativity does not allow communication faster than the speed of light.

In the theory of general relativity, the concept of causality is generalized in the most straightforward way:
the effect must belong to the future light cone of its cause, even if the spacetime is curved. New subtleties
must be taken into account when we investigate causality in quantum mechanics and relativistic quantum
field theory in particular. In those two theories, causality is closely related to the principle of locality.
However, the principle of locality is disputed: whether it strictly holds depends on the interpretation of
quantum mechanics chosen, especially for experiments involving quantum entanglement that satisfy Bell's
Theorem.
Despite these subtleties, causality remains an important and valid concept in physical theories. For example,
the notion that events can be ordered into causes and effects is necessary to prevent (or at least outline)
causality paradoxes such as the grandfather paradox, which asks what happens if a time-traveler kills his
own grandfather before he ever meets the time-traveler's grandmother. See also Chronology protection
conjecture.

Determinism (or, what causality is not)

The word causality in this context means that all effects must have specific physical causes due to
fundamental interactions.[4] Causality in this context is not associated with definitional principles such as
Newton's second law. As such, in the context of causality, a force does not cause a mass to accelerate nor
vice versa. Rather, Newton's Second Law can be derived from the conservation of momentum, which itself
is a consequence the spatial homogeneity of physical laws.

The empiricists' aversion to metaphysical explanations (like Descartes' vortex theory) meant that scholastic
arguments about what caused phenomena were either rejected for being untestable or were just ignored.
The complaint that physics does not explain the cause of phenomena has accordingly been dismissed as a
problem that is philosophical or metaphysical rather than empirical (e.g., Newton's "Hypotheses non
fingo"). According to Ernst Mach[5] the notion of force in Newton's second law was pleonastic,
tautological and superfluous and, as indicated above, is not considered a consequence of any principle of
causality. Indeed, it is possible to consider the Newtonian equations of motion of the gravitational
interaction of two bodies,

as two coupled equations describing the positions and of the two bodies, without interpreting the
right hand sides of these equations as forces; the equations just describe a process of interaction, without
any necessity to interpret one body as the cause of the motion of the other, and allow one to predict the
states of the system at later (as well as earlier) times.

The ordinary situations in which humans singled out some factors in a physical interaction as being prior
and therefore supplying the "because" of the interaction were often ones in which humans decided to bring
about some state of affairs and directed their energies to producing that state of affairs—a process that took
time to establish and left a new state of affairs that persisted beyond the time of activity of the actor. It
would be difficult and pointless, however, to explain the motions of binary stars with respect to each other
in that way which, indeed, are time-reversible and agnostic to the arrow of time, but with such a direction
of time established, the entire evolution system could then be completely determined.

The possibility of such a time-independent view is at the basis of the deductive-nomological (D-N) view of
scientific explanation, considering an event to be explained if it can be subsumed under a scientific law. In
the D-N view, a physical state is considered to be explained if, applying the (deterministic) law, it can be
derived from given initial conditions. (Such initial conditions could include the momenta and distance from
each other of binary stars at any given moment.) Such 'explanation by determinism' is sometimes referred to
as causal determinism. A disadvantage of the D-N view is that causality and determinism are more or less
identified. Thus, in classical physics, it was assumed that all events are caused by earlier ones according to
the known laws of nature, culminating in Pierre-Simon Laplace's claim that if the current state of the world
were known with precision, it could be computed for any time in the future or the past (see Laplace's
demon). However, this is usually referred to as Laplace determinism (rather than 'Laplace causality')
because it hinges on determinism in mathematical models as dealt with in the mathematical Cauchy
problem.
Confusion between causality and determinism is particularly acute in quantum mechanics, this theory being
acausal in the sense that it is unable in many cases to identify the causes of actually observed effects or to
predict the effects of identical causes, but arguably deterministic in some interpretations (e.g. if the wave
function is presumed not to actually collapse as in the many-worlds interpretation, or if its collapse is due to
hidden variables, or simply redefining determinism as meaning that probabilities rather than specific effects
are determined).

Distributed causality
Theories in physics like the butterfly effect from chaos theory open up the possibility of a type of
distributed parameter systems in causality. The butterfly effect theory proposes:

"Small variations of the initial condition of a nonlinear dynamical system may produce large
variations in the long term behavior of the system."

This opens up the opportunity to understand a distributed causality.

A related way to interpret the butterfly effect is to see it as highlighting the difference between the
application of the notion of causality in physics and a more general use of causality as represented by
Mackie's INUS conditions. In classical (Newtonian) physics, in general, only those conditions are
(explicitly) taken into account, that are both necessary and sufficient. For instance, when a massive sphere
is caused to roll down a slope starting from a point of unstable equilibrium, then its velocity is assumed to
be caused by the force of gravity accelerating it; the small push that was needed to set it into motion is not
explicitly dealt with as a cause. In order to be a physical cause there must be a certain proportionality with
the ensuing effect. A distinction is drawn between triggering and causation of the ball's motion. By the
same token the butterfly can be seen as triggering a tornado, its cause being assumed to be seated in the
atmospherical energies already present beforehand, rather than in the movements of a butterfly.

Causal dynamical triangulation

Causal dynamical triangulation (abbreviated as "CDT") invented by Renate Loll, Jan Ambjørn and Jerzy
Jurkiewicz, and popularized by Fotini Markopoulou and Lee Smolin, is an approach to quantum gravity
that like loop quantum gravity is background independent. This means that it does not assume any pre-
existing arena (dimensional space), but rather attempts to show how the spacetime fabric itself evolves. The
Loops '05 (http://loops05.aei.mpg.de/) conference, hosted by many loop quantum gravity theorists,
included several presentations which discussed CDT in great depth, and revealed it to be a pivotal insight
for theorists. It has sparked considerable interest as it appears to have a good semi-classical description. At
large scales, it re-creates the familiar 4-dimensional spacetime, but it shows spacetime to be 2-dimensional
near the Planck scale, and reveals a fractal structure on slices of constant time. Using a structure called a
simplex, it divides spacetime into tiny triangular sections. A simplex is the generalized form of a triangle, in
various dimensions. A 3-simplex is usually called a tetrahedron, and the 4-simplex, which is the basic
building block in this theory, is also known as the pentatope, or pentachoron. Each simplex is geometrically
flat, but simplices can be "glued" together in a variety of ways to create curved spacetimes. Where previous
attempts at triangulation of quantum spaces have produced jumbled universes with far too many
dimensions, or minimal universes with too few, CDT avoids this problem by allowing only those
configurations where cause precedes any effect. In other words, the timelines of all joined edges of
simplices must agree.
Thus, maybe, causality lies in the foundation of the spacetime geometry.

Causal sets
In causal set theory, causality takes an even more prominent place. The basis for this approach to quantum
gravity is in a theorem by David Malament. This theorem states that the causal structure of a spacetime
suffices to reconstruct its conformal class, so knowing the conformal factor and the causal structure is
enough to know the spacetime. Based on this, Rafael Sorkin proposed the idea of Causal Set Theory,
which is a fundamentally discrete approach to quantum gravity. The causal structure of the spacetime is
represented as a Poset, while the conformal factor can be reconstructed by identifying each poset element
with a unit volume.

Interaction, force and the conservation of momentum

By physical causation is meant an effect that was caused by physical interference propagated by force from
object A to object B. Momentum is propagated by force according to the Noether's theorem applied to
translational invariance in Lagrangian field theory, which is used to describe the fundamental forces of
nature when applied to the standard model.

See also
Causality – How one process influences another (general)
Causal contact – Sharing an event that affects entities in a causal way
Causal system – System where the output depends only on past and current inputs
Particle horizon – the maximum distance from which light from particles could have traveled
to the observer during the age of the universe
Philosophy of physics – Truths and principles of the study of matter, space, time and energy
Retrocausality – Concept in which the future affects the past
Synchronicity – Jungian concept of the meaningfulness of acausal coincidences
Wheeler–Feynman time-symmetric theory for electrodynamics – Interpretation of
electrodynamics

References
1. Green, Celia (2003). The Lost Cause: Causation and the Mind–Body Problem. Oxford:
Oxford Forum. ISBN 0-9536772-1-4. Includes three chapters on causality at the microlevel in
physics.
2. Bunge, Mario (1959). Causality: the place of the causal principle in modern science.
Cambridge: Harvard University Press.
3. A. Einstein, "Zur Elektrodynamik bewegter Koerper", Annalen der Physik 17, 891–921
(1905).
4. "Causality." Cambridge English Dictionary. Accessed November 18, 2018.
https://dictionary.cambridge.org/us/dictionary/english/causality
 5. Ernst Mach, Die Mechanik in ihrer Entwicklung, Historisch-kritisch dargestellt, Akademie-
Verlag, Berlin, 1988, section 2.7.

Further reading
Bohm, David. (2005). Causality and Chance in Modern Physics. London: Taylor and
Francis.
Espinoza, Miguel (2006). Théorie du déterminisme causal. Paris: L'Harmattan. ISBN 2-296-
01198-5.

External links
Causal Processes, Stanford Encyclopedia of Philosophy (http://plato.stanford.edu/entries/ca
usation-process/)
Caltech Tutorial on Relativity (https://web.archive.org/web/20061002122145/http://www.blac
k-holes.org/relativity3.html) — A nice discussion of how observers moving relatively to each
other see different slices of time.
Faster-than-c signals, special relativity, and causality (https://arxiv.org/abs/gr-qc/0107091).
This article explains that faster than light signals do not necessarily lead to a violation of
causality.

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