Atheism and the existence of peanut butter

[polymath257]

Good luck Poly.  He needs this to be true for his god to exist.  At the end of the day, he'll insist that a fact is wrong rather than concede he got a fact wrong.

Sort of like trying to explain biology to an ider.  When you've gone through and explained all the things they'd been misinformed about, rather than go, huh...cool..they think "well, this is dumb, biology is dumb, i didn't happen that way".

In defense of Kloro, I think he has asked Poly questions in good faith.  Most wouldn't even bother to look up the points Poly makes.

There is a problem with terminology when discussing physics terms with non-physicists.  Quantum Mechanics is causal, but not deterministic (but quantum causality doesn't mean what many think it means).  By that I mean that individual events are random, but their probabilities are calculable with knowledge of the local state, or by knowledge of past state within the light cone.

I wouldn't explain commutators the same way Poly did (though it may make sense that way in Quantum Field Theory, which I haven't studied.  I'd have to see the actual math).  A commutator measures uncertainty between two observable properties (i.e. the knowledge of one causes uncertainty in the other), not causality.  It is true that a zero commutator means no correlation (and therefore no causal connection) between two observables (where at the same place, or separated), but a non-zero commutator at two points does not mean causation directly between those points.  Causation is about information (proven by freely setting one state and seeing correlations with another).  We all know the idea of "spooky" action at a distance, where two separated particles can have entangled observables and they would be correlated.  However, one is not free to "set" one state.

Macroscopic reality forms when single states get so entangled with the environment that their Hamiltonian becomes diagonal or "classical", or when many random events (owing to the law of probabilities) create what we think of as classical laws (F=ma, thermodynamics, etc.).

What is typically described as 'causality' in books on quantum field theory is precisely that commutators outside of each others light cones are zero. Commutators inside the light cone can be non-zero, but do not have to be. That can depend on the specifics of the interaction.

So, once again, it is a difference in terminology as much as anything else. What the word 'causality' means in QFT is not the same, or even close, to what it means in  philosophy or theology.