Causal Reasoning in Physics
Mathias Frisch, University of Maryland

Abstract: Many philosophers of physics maintain appear to believe that there is no room for substantive causal notions in our more mature theories of physics.  In this paper I first critically examine several anti-causal arguments and then discuss two examples of causal reasoning in physics.  The first example is a well-established part of mature physics: the derivations of both classical and quantum dispersion relations in scattering phenomena.  The second example concerns a theory that currently is rather more speculative:  the causal-set approach to quantum gravity.