The Leo Apostel Center
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in collaboration with the Doctoral Programme of the VUB invites
everyone to the 31th of its interdisciplinary seminars in the
Foundations series. In this series CLEA invites scholars that are
actively engaged in the research on the foundations of a particular
discipline. Their lectures will always be directed to an
interdisciplinary audience, and the discussions aim at confronting
the foundations of the different disciplines.


                 Correlation's, common causes and the
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                    EPR-Bell situation in nature.
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                     by Prof. Dr. Laszlo E. Szabo

                     Eotvos University, Budapest


Monday, July 13 1998 at 5 p.m. at the CLEA house, Krijgskundestraat 33, 1160 Brussel.

About the lecture
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Reichenbach's Common Cause Principle claims that if there is a 
correlation between two events and none of them is directly causally 
influenced by the other, then there must exist a third event that can, as 
a common cause, account for the correlation. The EPR-Bell paradox 
consists in the problem that we observe correlation's between spatially 
separated events in the EPR-experiments, which do not admit common-cause-
type explanation; and it should therefore be concluded, that, contrary to 
relativity theory, in the realm of quantum physics there exists action at 
a distance, or at least superluminal causal propagation is possible; that 
is, either relativity theory or ReichenbachÕs common cause principle 
fails. This paradox will be analyzed. By means of closer analyses of the 
concept of common cause and a more precise reformulation of the EPR 
experimental scenario, we will sharpen the  conclusion we can draw from 
the violation of Bell's inequalities. It will be explicitly shown that 
the correlation's we encounter in the EPR experiment could have common 
causes; that is, ReichenbachÕs Common Cause Principle does not fail in 
quantum mechanics. Moreover, these common causes are entirely compatible 
with locality principle of relativity.

About the speaker
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Prof. Dr. Laszlo E. Szabo works at the Department of Theoretical Physics
and the Department of History and Philosophy of Science of the Eotvos 
University in Budapest, Hungary. His main field of research is the 
Foundations of Physics and more specifically the problems related to the 
interpretation of quantum mechanics. He has published several papers in 
this field and made important contributions to the problem of 
understanding the meaning of quantum mechanics for the nature of reality.


The presentations with questions will last about an hour. Afterwards,
an hour or more is reserved for an in-depth, group discussion of the
topic. More info at the CLEA office: phone 02-644 26 77 or via the
Web-page: http://pespmc1.vub.ac.be/CLEA/