Retrocausality - what would it take?

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• Huw Price (University of Cambridge)
• Thursday 01 March 2012, 14:15-15:15
• MR4, Centre for Mathematical Sciences.

If you have a question about this talk, please contact Paul Skrzypczyk.

Some writers argue that retrocausality offers an attractive loophole in Bell’s Theorem, allowing an explanation of EPR -Bell correlations without “spooky action-at-a-distance.” This idea originated more than a decade before Bell’s famous result, when de Broglie’s student, Olivier Costa de Beauregard, first proposed that retrocausality plays a role in EPR contexts. The proposal is difficult to assess, because there has been little work on the general question of what a world with retrocausality would “look like” – what kinds of considerations, if any, would properly lead to the conclusion that we do live in such a world. In this talk I discuss these general issues, with the aim of bringing the more specific question as to whether quantum theory implies retrocausality into sharper focus than has hitherto been possible. (The talk will go through the central argument from my paper http://arxiv.org/abs/1002.0906—there is quite a bit in that paper that I won’t talk about, but I’m happy to discuss any of it in Q&A, if anyone wants to raise it.)

This talk is part of the CQIF Seminar series.

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