Quantum Reality, Relativistic Causality, and Closing the Epistemic Circle

Transcription

1 Quantum Reality, Relativistic Causality, and Closing the Epistemic Circle

2 THE WESTERN ONTARIO SERIES IN PHILOSOPHY OF SCIENCE A SERIES OF BOOKS IN PHILOSOPHY OF SCIENCE, METHODOLOGY, EPISTEMOLOGY, LOGIC, HISTORY OF SCIENCE, AND RELATED FIELDS Managing Editor WILLIAM DEMOPOULOS Department of Philosophy, University of Western Ontario, Canada Managing Editor ROBERT E. BUTTS Late, Department of Philosophy, University of Western Ontario, Canada Editorial Board JOHN L. BELL, University of Western Ontario JEFFREY BUB, University of Maryland PETER CLARK, St Andrews University DAVID DEVIDI, University of Waterloo ROBERT DiSALLE, University of Western Ontario MICHAEL FRIEDMAN, Stanford University MICHAEL HALLETT, McGill University WILLIAM HARPER, University of Western Ontario CLIFFORD A. HOOKER, University of Newcastle AUSONIO MARRAS, University of Western Ontario JÜRGEN MITTELSTRASS, Universität Konstanz WAYNE C. MYRVOLD, University of Western Ontario THOMAS UEBEL, University of Manchester ITAMAR PITOWSKY, Hebrew University VOLUME 73

3 Wayne C. Myrvold Joy Christian Quantum Reality, Relativistic Causality, and Closing the Epistemic Circle Essays in Honour of Abner Shimony 123

4 Wayne C. Myrvold Department of Philosophy University of Western Ontario London, O N N6A 3K7 Canada wmyrvold@uwo.ca Joy Christian Wolfson College University of Oxford Oxford, OX2 6UD United Kingdom joy.christian@wolfson.ox.ac.uk ISBN: e-isbn: Library of Congress Control Number: c Springer Science+Business Media B.V No part of this work may be reproduced, stored in a retrieval system, or transmitted in any form or by any means, electronic, mechanical, photocopying, microfilming, recording or otherwise, without written permission from the Publisher, with the exception of any material supplied specifically for the purpose of being entered and executed on a computer system, for exclusive use by the purchaser of the work. Printed on acid-free paper springer.com

5 Abner Shimony and Manana Sikic

6 Acknowledgments This book collects papers stemming from a conference held in honour of Abner Shimony at the Perimeter Institute for Theoretical Physics in Waterloo, Ontario, Canada, July 18 21, 2006, together with some contributions from people who would have liked to have been at the conference, but were unable to attend. We would like to thank Jeremy Butterfield for initiating the idea of a conference in honour of Abner Shimony. We are also grateful to Howard Burton and Lucien Hardy for providing the venue for the conference at the Perimeter Institute, which also provided generous financial support for the conference. Additional financial support was provided by contributions from the Institute for Quantum Computing and the University of Western Ontario. We thank the staff of the Perimeter Institute, in particular the conference coordinator Kate Gillespie, for their dedicated efforts, which made the conference smoothly. We are grateful to William Demopoulos for his support for this volume, to Lucy Fleet of Springer for her editorial assistance and patience, to David Malament for his assistance with the editing of Howard Stein s paper, and to Paul Tappenden for the superb job he did in transcribing the Bistro Banter dialogue. Finally, we thank the contributors of this volume for their enthusiasm in joining us to honour our mentor and friend, Abner Shimony. The editors. vii

7 Contents Part I Introduction Passion at a Distance... 3 Don Howard Part II Philosophy, Methodology and History Balancing Necessity and Fallibilism: Charles Sanders Peirce on the Status of Mathematics and its Intersection with the Inquiry into Nature Ronald Anderson Newton s Methodology William Harper Whitehead s Philosophy and Quantum Mechanics (QM): ATribute to Abner Shimony Shimon Malin Bohr and the Photon John Stachel Part III Bell s Theorem and Nonlocality A. Theory Extending the Concept of an Element of Reality to Work with Inefficient Detectors Daniel M. Greenberger A General Proof of Nonlocality without Inequalities for Bipartite States GianCarlo Ghirardi and Luca Marinatto ix

8 x Contents On the Separability of Physical Systems Jon P. Jarrett Bell Inequalities: Many Questions, a Few Answers Nicolas Gisin B. Experiment Do Experimental Violations of Bell Inequalities Require a Nonlocal Interpretation of Quantum Mechanics? II: Analysis àlabell Edward S. Fry, Xinmei Qu, and Marlan O. Scully The Physics of Yanhua Shih Part IV Probability, Uncertainty, and Stochastic Modifications of Quantum Mechanics Interpretations of Probability in Quantum Mechanics: A Case of Experimental Metaphysics Geoffrey Hellman No Information Without Disturbance : Quantum Limitations of Measurement Paul Busch How Stands Collapse II Philip Pearle Is There a Relation Between the Breakdown of the Superposition Principle and an Indeterminacy in the Structure of the Einsteinian Space-Time? Andor Frenkel Indistinguishability or Stochastic Dependence? D. Costantini and U. Garibaldi Part V Relativity Plane Geometry in Spacetime N. David Mermin The Transient nows Steven F. Savitt Quantum in Gravity? Michael Horne

9 Contents xi A Proposed Test of the Local Causality of Spacetime Adrian Kent Quantum Gravity Computers: On the Theory of Computation with Indefinite Causal Structure Lucien Hardy Definability, Conventionality, and Simultaneity in Einstein Minkowski Space-Time Howard Stein Part VI Concluding Words Bistro Banter: A Dialogue with Abner Shimony and Lee Smolin Unfinished Work: A Bequest Abner Shimony Bibliography of Abner Shimony Index...507