Logo notas.itmens

Locality of Causation

Is causation local? This is nearly certainly not the case. Think about two entangled particles \(A\) and \(B\) separated by a spacelike interval, when we measure - so to speak - we may think that the act of measuring \(A\) caused \(A\)'s state to collapse to an eigenstate, and then \(A\)'s collapse caused \(B\)'s collapse to the resepective eigenstate - but this is gravely mistaken for we can also say that the act of measuring \(A\) caused \(B\)'s collapse. And maybe we can even say that we actually measured \(B\).

This doesn't lead to a collapse of the notion of physical causation, however, even though we can see in the argument that a chain of causation and the causation that is obtained by collapsing the chain seems to be identical for two events that is of concern.