Related papers: Precedence and freedom in quantum physics
Some principles underpinning the running of the Universe are discussed. The most important, the machine principle, states that the Universe is a fully autonomous, self-organizing and self-testing quantum automaton. Continuous space and…
Familiar textbook quantum mechanics assumes a fixed background spacetime to define states on spacelike surfaces and their unitary evolution between them. Quantum theory has changed as our conceptions of space and time have evolved. But…
We reformulate the problem of the "interpretation of quantum mechanics" as the problem of DERIVING the quantum mechanical formalism from a set of simple physical postulates. We suggest that the common unease with taking quantum mechanics as…
The notion of the quantum angle is introduced. The quantum angle turns out to be a metric on the set of physical states of a quantum system. Its kinematics and dynamics is studied. The certainty principle for quantum systems is formulated…
Quantum mechanics marks a radical departure from the classical understanding of Nature, fostering an inherent randomness which forbids a deterministic description; yet the most fundamental departure arises from something different. As shown…
If we admit that quantum mechanics (QM) is universal theory, then QM should contain also some description of classical mechanical systems. The presented text contains description of two different ways how the mathematical description of…
Quantum theory was discovered in an adventurous way, under the urge to solve puzzles-like the spectrum of the blackbody radiation-that haunted the physics community at the beginning of the 20th century. It soon became clear, though, that…
Modal interpretations have the ambition to construe quantum mechanics as an objective, man-independent description of physical reality. Their second leading idea is probabilism: quantum mechanics does not completely fix physical reality but…
Recently, it has been argued that quantum mechanics is complete, and that quantum states vectors are necessarily in one-to-one correspondence with the elements of reality, under the assumptions that quantum theory is correct and that…
By means of the examples of classical and Bohmian quantum mechanics, we illustrate the well-known ideas of Boltzmann as to how one gets from laws defined for the universe as a whole to dynamical relations describing the evolution of…
Although time is one of our most intuitive physical concepts, its understanding at the fundamental level is still an open question in physics. For instance, time in quantum mechanics and general relativity are two distinct and incompatible…
We present a new characterization of quantum theory in terms of simple physical principles that is different from previous ones in two important respects: first, it only refers to properties of single systems without any assumptions on the…
Quantum mechanics---the theory describing the fundamental workings of nature---is famously counterintuitive: it predicts that a particle can be in two places at the same time, and that two remote particles can be inextricably and…
The new interpretation of Quantum Mechanics is based on a complex probability theory. An interpretation postulate specifies events which can be observed and it follows that the complex probability of such event is, in fact, a real positive…
"Quantum mechanics must be regarded as open systems. On one hand, this is due to the fact that, like in classical physics, any realistic system is subjected to a coupling to an uncontrollable environment which influences it in a…
Physics is a model of nature able to both describe and predict the results of measurements made with respect to reference systems. These reference systems, in turn, are themselves physical and thus subject to the laws of physics. The…
The first law of thermodynamics imposes not just a constraint on the energy-content of systems in extreme quantum regimes, but also symmetry-constraints related to the thermodynamic processing of quantum coherence. We show that this…
The three major theoretical principles of quantum mechanics relevant to its interpretation are: (T1), linearity; (T2), invariance under certain groups; and (T3) the orthogonality and isolation of the different branches of the state vector.…
Interpretation problems are eliminated from quantum theory by picturing a quantum history as having been sampled from a probability distribution over the set of histories which are permitted by all relevant boundary conditions. In…
The notion of probability plays a crucial role in quantum mechanics. It appears in quantum mechanics as the Born rule. In modern mathematics which describes quantum mechanics, however, probability theory means nothing other than measure…