Philosophy of Physics Seminar (Thursday - Week 5, TT21)

Cluster decomposition is a locality constraint. Roughly, it holds that scattering experiments conducted at large spatial remove from one another should give independent results. At this level of specificity nearly everyone seems to be in agreement. There is significant variation, however, in how the principle is mathematically expressed and in how its adoption is motivated. Moreover, some articulations of the principle seem to stand in tension with the phenomena of quantum entanglement. In this talk, I will present some preliminary efforts to articulate what precisely we should take the content of the principle to be, and how to square it with the presence of entanglement in quantum field theory. This is work done in collaboration with John Dougherty (LMU) and Porter Williams (USC).

All of those wishing to attend should email Adam Caulton in order to register attendance.