Philosophy of Physics Seminar (Thursday - Week 6, MT18)

Abstract: From a discussion of how to generalise Reichenbach’s Principle of the Common Cause to the case of quantum systems, I will develop a formalism to describe any set of quantum systems that have specified causal relationships between them. This formalism is the nearest quantum analogue to the classical causal models of Judea Pearl and others. I will illustrate the formalism with some simple examples, and if time, describe the quantum analogue of a well known classical theorem that relates the causal relationships between random variables to conditional independences in their joint probability distribution. I will end with some more speculative remarks concerning the significance of the work for the foundations of quantum theory. .