Causality (physics)
Causality is the relationship between causes and effects. The notion of causality does not have an agreed upon definition in the sciences. Causality is also a topic studied from the perspectives of philosophy and statistics. From the perspective of physics, it is generally believed that causality cannot occur between an effect and an event that is not in the back light cone of said effect. Similarly, a cause could not have an effect outside its front light cone.
Causality in physics
In classical physics, an effect cannot occur before its cause. In Einstein's theory of special relativity, causality means that an effect can not occur from a cause that is not in the back light cone of that event. Similarly, a cause cannot have an effect outside its front light cone. These restrictions are consistent with the grounded belief that 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.Causality in this context should not be confused with Newton's second law, which is related to the conservation of momentum, and is a consequence of the spatial homogeneity of physical laws. The word causality in this context means that all effects must have specific causes. As discussed below, this is a principle that is violated in some theories of modern physics.
Another requirement, at least valid at the level of human experience, is that cause and effect be mediated across space and time. This requirement has been very influential in the past, in the first place as a result of direct observation of causal processes, in the second place as a problematic aspect of Newton's theory of gravitation replacing mechanistic proposals like Descartes' vortex theory; in the third place as an incentive to develop dynamic field theories restoring contiguity in the transmission of influences in a more successful way than did Descartes' theory.
The empiricists' aversion to metaphysical explanations lends heavy influence against the idea of the importance of causality. Causality has accordingly sometimes been downplayed. According to Ernst Mach the notion of force in Newton's second law was pleonastic, tautological and superfluous. 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 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.
The possibility of such a time-independent view is at the basis of the deductive-nomological 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 law, it can be derived from given initial conditions. 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. However, this is usually referred to as Laplace determinism because it hinges on determinism in mathematical models as dealt with in the mathematical Cauchy problem. Confusion of 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.
In modern physics, the notion of causality had to be clarified. The insights of the theory of special relativity confirmed the assumption of causality, but they made the meaning of the word "simultaneous" observer-dependent. 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 quantum field theory, 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 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.
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 physics, in general, only those conditions are 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 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, but rather attempts to show how the spacetime fabric itself evolves. The 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-d 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.