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Are Probabilism and Special Relativity Compatible?

Published online by Cambridge University Press:  01 April 2022

Nicholas Maxwell
Nicholas Maxwell*
Affiliation:
Department of the History and Philosophy of Science University College, London, U.K
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Abstract

Are probabilism and special relativity compatible? Dieks argues that they are. But the possible universe he specifies, designed to exemplify both probabilism and special relativity, either incorporates a universal “now” (and is thus incompatible with special relativity), or amounts to a many world universe (which I have discussed, and rejected as too ad hoc to be taken seriously), or fails to have any one definite overall Minkowskian-type space-time structure (and thus differs drastically from special relativity as ordinarily understood). Probabilism and special relativity appear to be incompatible after all. What is at issue is not whether “the flow of time” can be reconciled with special relativity, but rather whether explicitly probabilistic versions of quantum theory should be rejected because of incompatibility with special relativity.

Type
Discussion
Information
Philosophy of Science , Volume 55 , Issue 4 , December 1988 , pp. 640 - 645
Copyright
Copyright © 1988 by the Philosophy of Science Association

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Footnotes

†

I wish to thank Robert Seymour for helpful discussion.

References

REFERENCES

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