English

Born's rule yields classical states and classical mechanics

Quantum Physics 2019-06-17 v1 High Energy Physics - Theory

Abstract

It is shown that Schrodinger's equation and Born's rule are sufficient to ensure that the states of macroscopic collective coordinate subsystems are microscopically localized in phase space and that the localized state follows the classical trajectory with random quantum noise that is indistinguishable from the pseudo-random noise of classical Brownian motion. This happens because in realistic systems the localization rate determined by the coupling to the environment is greater than the Lyapunov exponent that governs chaotic spreading in phase space. For realistic systems, the trajectories of the collective coordinate subsystem are at the same time an "unravelling" and a set of "consistent/decoherent histories". Different subsystems have their own stochastic dynamics that generally knit together to form a global dynamics, although in certain contrived thought experiments, most notably Wigner's friend, in the contrary, there is observer complementarity.

Keywords

Cite

@article{arxiv.1906.06072,
  title  = {Born's rule yields classical states and classical mechanics},
  author = {Timothy J. Hollowood},
  journal= {arXiv preprint arXiv:1906.06072},
  year   = {2019}
}

Comments

31 pages

R2 v1 2026-06-23T09:53:35.293Z