LHC@home

The true causes, to a physicist, are the fundamental forces acting between particles; all effects ripple out from there. Indeed, these forces, when they can be isolated, appear perfectly deterministic and reliable — physicists can predict with high precision the outcomes of particle collisions at the Large Hadron Collider, for instance. In this view, causes and effects become hard to predict from first principles only when there are too many variables to track.

Furthermore, philosophers have argued that causal power existing at two scales at once would be twice what the world needs; to avoid double-counting, the “exclusion argument” says all causal power must originate at the micro level. But it’s almost always easier to discuss causes and effects in terms of macroscopic entities. When we look for the cause of a fatal car crash, or Romeo’s decision to start climbing, “it doesn’t seem right to go all the way down to microscopic scales of neurons firing,” DeDeo said. “That’s where Erik [Hoel] is jumping in. It’s a bit of a bold thing to do to talk about the mathematics of causation.”