Relativity of Causal Structure in Quantum Theory

Abstract

Quantum theory is a mathematical formalism to compute probabilities for outcomes happenning in physical experiments. These outcomes constitute events happening in space-time. One of these events represents the fact that a system located in the region of space where is situated a physical device has a certain value of a physical observable at the time when the device fires the outcome corresponding to that value of the observable. The causal structure of these events is customarily assumed fixed in an absolute way. In this paper we show that this assumption cannot be substantiated on operational grounds proving that two observers looking at the same quantum experiment can calculate the probabilities of the experiment assuming a different causal structure for the space-time events constituted by the outcomes. We will thus say that in quantum theory we have relativity of causal structure.