Related papers: What is Statistics?; The Answer by Quantum Languag…
Endeavoring to formulate an exhaustive solution to the measurement problem in view of the theory of decoherence leads to a better understanding of the status of the collapse and of the emergence of classicality, thanks to a precise…
Many questions of fundamental interest in todays science can be formulated as inference problems: Some partial, or noisy, observations are performed over a set of variables and the goal is to recover, or infer, the values of the variables…
A statistical measure is given expressing relative occurrences of quantities within a given data set. Application of this measure on several real life physical data sets and some abstract distributions are shown to yield consistent results.…
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 contrast two possible attitudes towards a given branch of physics: as inferential (i.e., as concerned with an agent's ability to make predictions given finite information), and as dynamical (i.e., as concerned with the dynamical equations…
This review, of the understanding of quantum mechanics, is broad in scope, and aims to reflect enough of the literature to be representative of the current state of the subject. To enhance clarity, the main findings are presented in the…
It is shown that quantum mechanics is a plausible statistical description of an ontology described by classical electrodynamics. The reason that no contradiction arises with various no-go theorems regarding the compatibility of QM with a…
Physics is based on probabilities as fundamental entities of a mathematical description. Expectation values of observables are computed according to the classical statistical rule. The overall probability distribution for one world covers…
The basic physical problems that necessitated the emergence of quantum physics are summarized, along with the elements of wave mechanics and its traditional statistical interpretation. Alternative interpretations to the statistical one,…
Particle statistics is a fundamental part of quantum physics, and yet its role and use in the context of quantum information have been poorly explored so far. After briefly introducing particle statistics and the Symmetrization Postulate, I…
We give a survey of the foundations of statistical queries and their many applications to other areas. We introduce the model, give the main definitions, and we explore the fundamental theory statistical queries and how how it connects to…
In this paper, I attempt a personal account of my understanding of the measurement problem in quantum mechanics, which has been largely in the tradition of the Copenhagen interpretation. I assume that (i) the quantum state is a…
Quantum statistics originate from the physics of state preparation. It is therefore wrong to think of quantum states as fundamental. In fact, quantum states are merely summaries of dynamical processes that randomize the properties of the…
In this paper a didactic approach is described which immediately leads to an understanding of those postulates of quantum mechanics used most frequently in quantum computation. Moreover, an interpretation of quantum mechanics is presented…
The term "measurement" in quantum theory (as well as in other physical theories) is ambiguous: It is used to describe both an experience - e.g., an observation in an experiment - and an interaction with the system under scrutiny. If doing…
Results of measurements give legitimacy to a physical theory. What if acquiring these results in the first place necessitates what the same theory considers to be an interaction? In this note, we assume that theories account for…
I take a pragmatist perspective on quantum theory. This is not a view of the world described by quantum theory. In this view quantum theory itself does not describe the physical world, nor our observatons, experiences or opinions of it.…
Quantum contextuality describes situations where the statistics observed in different measurement contexts cannot be explained by a measurement independent reality of the system. The most simple case is observed in a three-dimensional…
We give a review of concepts related to connection of classical and quantum theories, from the phase space perspective. Quantum theory is described by non-commutative operators of coordinates and momenta, results in values having a certain…
A characteristical property of a classical physical theory is that the observables are real functions taking an exact outcome on every (pure) state; in a quantum theory, at the contrary, a given observable on a given state can take several…