Related papers: The Quantum Closet
The developments of special relativity and quantum mechanics marked the beginning of the modern physics age. The former has taught us that while space and time are frame dependent notions, there is a quantity -- the space-time interval --…
General relativity and quantum mechanics are conflicting theories. The seeds of discord are the fundamental principles on which these theories are grounded. General relativity, on one hand, is based on the equivalence principle, whose…
Despite the widely-held premise that initial boundary conditions (BCs) corresponding to measurements/interactions can fully specify a physical subsystem, a literal reading of Hamilton's principle would imply that both initial and final BCs…
The behavior of a massive scalar particle on the spacetime surrounding a monopole is studied from a quantum mechanical point of view. All the boundary conditions necessary to turn into self-adjoint the spatial portion of the wave operator…
The third quantization formalism of quantum cosmology adds simplicity and conceptual insight into the quantum description of the multiverse. Within such a formalism, the existence of squeezed and entangled states raises the question of…
Quantum mechanics is widely regarded as a complete theory, yet we argue it is a tractable projection of a deeper, computationally-inaccessible classical variational structure. By analyzing the coupled partial differential equations of the…
An interpretation and re-formulation of modern physics which removes the presumption of the space-time continuum, and bases physical theory on a small number of rational and empirical principles. After briefly describing the philosophical…
The hypothesis is proposed that under the approximation that the quantum equations of motion reduce to the classical ones, the quantum vacuum also reduces to the classical vacuum--the empty space. The vacuum energy of QED is studied under…
On classical phase spaces admitting just one complex-differentiable structure, there is no indeterminacy in the choice of the creation operators that create quanta out of a given vacuum. In these cases the notion of a quantum is universal,…
A type of mechanics will be presented that possesses some distinctive properties. On the one hand, its physical description & rules of operation are readily comprehensible & intuitively clear. On the other, it fully satisfies all observable…
Quantum mechanics provides a statistical description about nature, and thus would be incomplete if its statistical predictions could not be accounted for by some realistic models with hidden variables. There are, however, two powerful…
We analyze classical and quantum dynamics of a particle in 2d spacetimes with constant curvature which are locally isometric but globally different. We show that global symmetries of spacetime specify the symmetries of physical phase-space…
The conventional postulate for the probabilistic interpretation of quantum mechanics is asymmetric in preparation and measurement, making retrodiction reliant on inference by use of Bayes' theorem. Here, a more fundamental symmetric…
Considering quantum cosmological minisuperspace models with positive potential, we present evidence that (i) despite common belief there are perspectives for defining a unique, naturally preferred decomposition of the space H of wave…
This article presents a novel interpretation of quantum mechanics. It extends the meaning of ``measurement'' to include all property-indicating facts. Intrinsically space is undifferentiated: there are no points on which a world of locally…
The existence of a fundamental scale, a lower bound to any output of a position measurement, seems to be a model-independent feature of quantum gravity. In fact, different approaches to this theory lead to this result. The key ingredients…
We derive the classical limit of quantum mechanics by describing the center of mass of a system constituted by a large number of particles. We will show that in that limit the commutator between the position and velocity of the center of…
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…
A new formulation of relativistic quantum mechanics is presented and applied to a free, massive, and spin zero elementary particle in the Minkowski spacetime. The reformulation requires that time and space, as well as the timelike and…
The gap between classical mechanics and quantum mechanics has an important interpretive implication: the Universe must have an irreducible fundamental level, which determines the properties of matter at higher levels of organization. We…