Related papers: The Problem of the Observer in Physics
After a summary of Bohr's views and their relation to Kant's theory of science, two fruitless lines of attack on the measurement problem are discussed: the way of the psi-ontologist and the way of the QBist. In the remainder of the paper…
The paper reviews and discusses four ideas scattered in previous papers of the author. First, objective properties of quantum systems are not associated with observables but are defined by preparations. Second, measurable results of…
Symmetry is one of the most general and useful concepts in physics. A theory or a system that has a symmetry is fundamentally constrained by it. The same constraints do not apply when the symmetry is broken. The quantitative determination…
A new formulation of quantum mechanics is developed which does not require the concept of the wave-particle duality. Rather than assigning probabilities to outcomes, probabilities are instead assigned to entire fine-grained histories. The…
I argue that, contrary to the standard view, one cannot understand the structure and nature of our knowledge in physics without an analysis of the way that observers (and, more generally, measuring instruments and experimental arrangements)…
Duality, not monism, constitutes the hermeneutic lens that characterizes the original Copenhagen interpretation of Quantum Mechanics. Therefore, evoking the principles of correspondence and complementarity, in this work we re-assert a…
Although the solution, within standard quantum physics, of the problem of outcomes has been published several times, many authors continue to treat measurement as an unsolved fundamental dilemma. The solution lies in the formation of…
A pedagogical and reasonably self-contained introduction to the measurement problems in quantum mechanics and their partial solution by environment-induced decoherence (plus some other important aspects of dcoherence) is given. The point…
We summarise different aspects of the measurement problem in quantum mechanics. We argue that it is a real problem which requires a solution, and identify the properties a theory needs to solve the problem. We show that no current…
"The unambiguous account of proper quantum phenomena must, in principle, include a description of all relevant features of experimental arrangement" (Bohr). The measurement process is composed of pre-measurement (quantum correlation of the…
We give an elementary account of quantum measurement and related topics from the modern perspective of decoherence. The discussion should be comprehensible to students who have completed a basic course in quantum mechanics with exposure to…
Since the appearance of General Relativity, its intrinsec general covariance has been very often misinterpreted as implying that physically meaningful quantitities (and conclusions extracted from the theory) have to be absolutely…
A minimal approach to the measurement problem and the quantum-to-classical transition assumes a universally valid quantum formalism, i.e. unitary time evolution governed by a Schr\"odinger-type equation. As had been pointed out long ago, in…
Several recent studies have been devoted to investigating the limitations that ordinary quantum mechanics and/or quantum gravity might impose on the measurability of space-time observables. These analyses are often confined to the…
We start with a discussion of the use of mathematics to model the real world then justify the role of Hilbert space formalism for such modelling in the general context of quantum logic. Following this, the incompleteness of the…
We propose a formal framework for understanding and unifying the concept of observers across physics, computer science, philosophy, and related fields. Building on cybernetic feedback models, we introduce an operational definition of…
In this article I deal with the notion of observation in the most fundamental sense and its representation by means of formal languages serving as expressional tools of formal-axiomatical theories. In doing so, I have taken this notion in…
The question whether quantum measurements reflect some underlying objective reality has no generally accepted answer. We show that description of such reality is possible under natural conditions such as linearity and causality, although in…
The traditional measurement theory interprets the variance as the dispersion of a measured value, which is actually contrary to a general mathematical concept that the variance of a constant is 0. This paper will fully demonstrate that the…
We analyse a proposition which considers quantum theory as a mere tool for calculating probabilities for sequences of outcomes of observations made by an Observer, who him/herself remains outside the scope of the theory. Predictions are…