Talk by Tom Pashby at MCMP (May 28)

[Dardashti, Radin]

Speaker: Tom Pashby (Pittsburgh)
Wednesday 28th May 2014
Location: Ludwigstr. 31 room 021
Time: 16:15 - 17:45

Title:  Against Dogma: Locality, Conditionalisation, and Collapse in 
Relativistic Quantum Mechanics

Abstract:
I argue here against the widespread view (due to David Malament) that 
the non-commutativity of non-instantaneous localisation projections 
implies the existence of act-outcome correlations in relativistic QM.  
There are two facets to my argument: first, I claim that the 
interpretation of collapse as a process brought about by the 
experimenter is mistaken; second, I contend that a fully relativistic 
model should not condition on the occurrence of spacelike separated 
instantaneous events.  This leaves the door open to define a 
relativistically invariant (but non-commuting) system of localization, 
which I interpret in terms of conditional probabilities for the 
occurrence of events.  In accord with Tumulka (2009), I conclude that 
non-local correlations of events in a relativistic quantum theory need 
not imply the sort of action at a distance that worries Malament (1996).