Cargando…
Causal Intuition and Delayed-Choice Experiments
The conventional explanation of delayed-choice experiments appears to violate our causal intuition at the quantum level. I reanalyze these experiments using time-reversed and time-symmetric formulations of quantum mechanics. The time-reversed formulation does not give the same experimental predictio...
Autor principal: | |
---|---|
Formato: | Online Artículo Texto |
Lenguaje: | English |
Publicado: |
MDPI
2020
|
Materias: | |
Acceso en línea: | https://www.ncbi.nlm.nih.gov/pmc/articles/PMC7823684/ https://www.ncbi.nlm.nih.gov/pubmed/33375310 http://dx.doi.org/10.3390/e23010023 |
_version_ | 1783639894476718080 |
---|---|
author | Heaney, Michael B. |
author_facet | Heaney, Michael B. |
author_sort | Heaney, Michael B. |
collection | PubMed |
description | The conventional explanation of delayed-choice experiments appears to violate our causal intuition at the quantum level. I reanalyze these experiments using time-reversed and time-symmetric formulations of quantum mechanics. The time-reversed formulation does not give the same experimental predictions. The time-symmetric formulation gives the same experimental predictions but actually violates our causal intuition at the quantum level. I explore the reasons why our causal intuition may be wrong at the quantum level, suggest how conventional causation might be recovered in the classical limit, propose a quantum analog to the classical block universe viewpoint, and speculate on implications of the time-symmetric formulation for cosmological boundary conditions. |
format | Online Article Text |
id | pubmed-7823684 |
institution | National Center for Biotechnology Information |
language | English |
publishDate | 2020 |
publisher | MDPI |
record_format | MEDLINE/PubMed |
spelling | pubmed-78236842021-02-24 Causal Intuition and Delayed-Choice Experiments Heaney, Michael B. Entropy (Basel) Article The conventional explanation of delayed-choice experiments appears to violate our causal intuition at the quantum level. I reanalyze these experiments using time-reversed and time-symmetric formulations of quantum mechanics. The time-reversed formulation does not give the same experimental predictions. The time-symmetric formulation gives the same experimental predictions but actually violates our causal intuition at the quantum level. I explore the reasons why our causal intuition may be wrong at the quantum level, suggest how conventional causation might be recovered in the classical limit, propose a quantum analog to the classical block universe viewpoint, and speculate on implications of the time-symmetric formulation for cosmological boundary conditions. MDPI 2020-12-26 /pmc/articles/PMC7823684/ /pubmed/33375310 http://dx.doi.org/10.3390/e23010023 Text en © 2020 by the author. Licensee MDPI, Basel, Switzerland. This article is an open access article distributed under the terms and conditions of the Creative Commons Attribution (CC BY) license (http://creativecommons.org/licenses/by/4.0/). |
spellingShingle | Article Heaney, Michael B. Causal Intuition and Delayed-Choice Experiments |
title | Causal Intuition and Delayed-Choice Experiments |
title_full | Causal Intuition and Delayed-Choice Experiments |
title_fullStr | Causal Intuition and Delayed-Choice Experiments |
title_full_unstemmed | Causal Intuition and Delayed-Choice Experiments |
title_short | Causal Intuition and Delayed-Choice Experiments |
title_sort | causal intuition and delayed-choice experiments |
topic | Article |
url | https://www.ncbi.nlm.nih.gov/pmc/articles/PMC7823684/ https://www.ncbi.nlm.nih.gov/pubmed/33375310 http://dx.doi.org/10.3390/e23010023 |
work_keys_str_mv | AT heaneymichaelb causalintuitionanddelayedchoiceexperiments |