Related papers: Adaptive Coarse Graining, Environment, Strong Deco…
In this universe, governed fundamentally by quantum mechanical laws, characterized by indeterminism and distributed probabilities, classical deterministic laws are applicable over a wide range of time, place, and scale. We review the origin…
Our everyday descriptions of the universe are highly coarse-grained, following only a tiny fraction of the variables necessary for a perfectly fine-grained description. Coarse graining in classical physics is made natural by our limited…
We sketch a quantum mechanical framework for the universe as a whole. Within that framework we propose a program for describing the ultimate origin in quantum cosmology of the quasiclassical domain of familiar experience and for…
The origin of the phenomenological deterministic laws that approximately govern the quasiclassical domain of familiar experience is considered in the context of the quantum mechanics of closed systems such as the universe as a whole. We…
We continue our efforts to understand, within the framework of the quantum mechanics of the universe as a whole, the quasiclassical realm of familiar experience as a feature emergent from the Hamiltonian of the elementary particles and the…
Decoherent histories quantum theory is reformulated with the assumption that there is one "real" fine-grained history, specified in a preferred complete set of sum-over-histories variables. This real history is described by embedding it in…
These are the author's lectures at the 1992 Les Houches Summer School, "Gravitation and Quantizations". They develop a generalized sum-over-histories quantum mechanics for quantum cosmology that does not require either a preferred notion of…
A striking feature of our fundamentally indeterministic quantum universe is its quasiclassical realm -- the wide range of time place and scale in which the deterministic laws of classical physics hold. Our quasiclassical realmis an emergent…
A pedagogical introduction is given to the quantum mechanics of closed systems, most generally the universe as a whole. Quantum mechanics aims at predicting the probabilities of alternative coarse-grained time histories of a closed system.…
The most striking observable feature of our indeterministic quantum universe is the wide range of time, place, and scale on which the deterministic laws of classical physics hold to an excellent approximation. This essay describes how this…
The origin of classical predictability is investigated for the one dimensional harmonic chain considered as a closed quantum mechanical system. By comparing the properties of a family of coarse-grained descriptions of the chain, we conclude…
Conceptually different from the decoherence program, we present a novel theoretical approach to macroscopic realism and classical physics within quantum theory. It focuses on the limits of observability of quantum effects of macroscopic…
The Renormalization Group encodes three concepts that could be key to accelerate progress in quantum gravity. First, it provides a micro-macro connection that could connect microscopic spacetime physics to phenomenology at observationally…
In this report we discuss three aspects: 1) Semiclassical gravity theory (SCG): 4 levels of theories describing the interaction of quantum matter with classical gravity; 2) Alternative Quantum Theories: Discerning those which are derivable…
With the birth of quantum information science, many tools have been developed to deal with many-body quantum systems. Although a complete description of such systems is desirable, it will not always be possible to achieve this goal, as the…
We study the decoherence properties of a certain class of Markovian quantum open systems from both the Decohering Histories and Environment Induced Superselection paradigms. The class studied includes many familiar quantum optical cases.…
Reference frames are of special importance in physics. They are usually considered to be idealized entities. However, in most situations, e.g. in laboratories, physical processes are described within reference frames constituted by physical…
Decoherence shows how the openness of quantum systems -- interaction with their environment -- suppresses flagrant manifestations of quantumness. Einselection accounts for the emergence of preferred quasi-classical pointer states. Quantum…
I propose a new class of interpretations, {\it real world interpretations}, of the quantum theory of closed systems. These interpretations postulate a preferred factorization of Hilbert space and preferred projective measurements on one…
Precise rules are developed in order to formalize the reasoning processes involved in standard non-relativistic quantum mechanics, with the help of analogies from classical physics. A classical or quantum description of a mechanical system…