Causality

Causality denotes a necessary relationship between one event (called cause) and another event (called effect) which is the direct consequence of the first.[1]
While this informal understanding suffices in everyday use, the philosophical analysis of how best to characterize causality extends over millennia. In the Western philosophical tradition, discussion stretches back at least as far as Aristotle, and the topic remains a staple in contemporary philosophy journals.
Though cause and effect are typically related to events, candidates include objects, processes, properties, variables, facts, and states of affairs; which of these make up the causal relata, and how best to characterize the relationship between them, remains under discussion.
According to Sowa (2000),[2] up until the twentieth century, three assumptions described by Max Born in 1949 were dominant in the definition of causality:
"Causality postulates that there are laws by which the occurrence of an entity B of a certain class depends on the occurrence of an entity A of another class, where the word entity means any physical object, phenomenon, situation, or event. A is called the cause, B the effect. "Antecedence postulates that the cause must be prior to, or at least simultaneous with, the effect. "Contiguity postulates that cause and effect must be in spatial contact or connected by a chain of intermediate things in contact." (Born, 1949, as cited in Sowa, 2000) However, according to Sowa (2000), "relativity and quantum mechanics have forced physicists to abandon these assumptions as exact statements of what happens at the most fundamental levels, but they remain valid at the level of human experience."[2]