Related papers: Inferential vs. Dynamical Conceptions of Physics
A proposal is made for a fundamental theory, in which the history of the universe is constituted of diverse views of itself. Views are attributes of events, and the theory's only be-ables; they comprise information about energy and momentum…
The standard presentation of the principles of quantum mechanics is critically reviewed both from the experimental/operational point and with respect to the request of mathematical consistency and logical economy. A simpler and more…
Common observations of the unpredictability of human behavior and the influence of one question on the answer to another suggest social science experiments are probabilistic and may be mutually incompatible with one another, characteristics…
Quantum mechanics is usually presented starting from a series of postulates about the mathematical framework. In this work we show that those same postulates can be derived by assuming that measurements are discrete interactions: that is,…
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…
In classical physics, probabilistic or statistical knowledge has been always related to ignorance or inaccurate subjective knowledge about an actual state of affairs. This idea has been extended to quantum mechanics through a completely…
A formulation of quantum mechanics, which begins by postulating assertions for individual physical systems, is given. The statistical predictions of quantum mechanics for infinite ensembles are then derived from its assertions for…
In this paper we compare two different notions of 'power', both of which attempt to provide a realist understanding of quantum mechanics grounded on the potential mode of existence. For this propose we will begin by introducing two…
Statistical inference is the science of drawing conclusions about some system from data. In modern signal processing and machine learning, inference is done in very high dimension: very many unknown characteristics about the system have to…
It is proposed to define "quantumness" of a system (micro or macroscopic, physical, biological, social, political) by starting with understanding that quantum mechanics is a statistical theory. It says us only about probability…
We generalize classical statistical mechanics to describe the kinematics and the dynamics of systems whose variables are constrained by a single quantum postulate (discreteness of the spectrum of values of at least one variable of the…
Quantum mechanics for a four-state-system is derived from classical statistics. Entanglement, interference, the difference between identical fermions or bosons and the unitary time evolution find an interpretation within a classical…
We show that, in spite of a rather common opinion, quantum mechanics can be represented as an approximation of classical statistical mechanics. The approximation under consideration is based on the ordinary Taylor expansion of physical…
Quantum theory's irreducible empirical core is a probability calculus. While it presupposes the events to which (and on the basis of which) it serves to assign probabilities, and therefore cannot account for their occurrence, it has to be…
Traditional statistical estimation, or statistical inference in general, is static, in the sense that the estimate of the quantity of interest does not change the future evolution of the quantity. In some sequential estimation problems…
After centuries of research, how subjective experience relates to physical phenomena remains unclear. Recent strategies attempt to identify the physical correlates of experience. Less studied is how scientists eliminate the "spurious"…
Information is everywhere in nature which is very uncertain and unpredictable. But information, in itself, is a very ambiguous term. In this cursory write-up, we attempt to understand the formal meaning of information by quantifying…
Differentiable physics provides a new approach for modeling and understanding the physical systems by pairing the new technology of differentiable programming with classical numerical methods for physical simulation. We survey the rapidly…
Quantum mechanics and classical statistical mechanics are two physical theories that share several analogies in their mathematical apparatus and physical foundations. In particular, classical statistical mechanics is hallmarked by the…
The nature of a physical law is examined, and it is suggested that there may not be any fundamental dynamical laws. This explains the intrinsic indeterminism of quantum theory. The probabilities for transition from a given initial state to…