Monday, August 26, 2019

Physical possibility

Here is an interesting question: How can one tell from a physics theory whether some event is physically possible according to that theory?

A sufficient condition for physical possibility is that the physics assigns a non-zero chance to it. But this is surely not a necessary condition. After all, it is possible that you will get heads on each of infinitely many tosses of an indeterministic die, while the chance of that is zero.

Plausibly, a necessary condition is that the event should be describable within the state space of the theory. Thus, the state space of classical mechanics simply cannot describe an electron being in a superposition of two position states, and hence such a superposition is physically impossible. But this necessary condition is not sufficient, as Newtonian mechanics bans various transitions that can be described within the state space of classical mechanics.

So, we have a necessary condition and a sufficient condition for physical possibility relative to a physics theory. It would be nice to have a necessary and sufficient condition.

1 comment:

Alexander R Pruss said...

I am now suspicious of the necessary condition.