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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...

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Autor principal: Heaney, Michael B.
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
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author Heaney, Michael B.
author_facet Heaney, Michael B.
author_sort Heaney, Michael B.
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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.
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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
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