Related papers: Realism and instrumentalism about the wave functio…
The meaning of the wave function has been a hot topic of debate since the early days of quantum mechanics. Recent years have witnessed a growing interest in this long-standing question. Is the wave function ontic, directly representing a…
Functionalism is the view that being x is to play the role of x. This paper defends a functionalist account of three-dimensional entities in the context of Wave Function Realism (WFR), that can explain in detail how we can recover…
The persistent debate about the reality of a quantum state has recently come under limelight because of its importance to quantum information and the quantum computing community. Almost all of the deliberations are taking place using the…
The quantum mechanical wave-particle dualism is analyzed and criticized, in the framework of Reichenbach's concepts of phenomenon and interphenomenon. It is suggested that the dual pictures be de-emphasized in the study of quantum theory,…
Within the Ontological Models Framework (OMF), Pusey, Barrett, and Rudolph (PBR) have given an argument by which they claimed that the epistemic view on the wavefunction should be ruled out. This study highlights an incorrect conclusion in…
Disputes on the foundations of Quantum Mechanics often involve the conception of reality, without a clear definition on which aspect of this broad concept of reality one refers. We provide an overview of conceptions of reality in classical…
In contrast to wave functions in nonrelativistic quantum mechanics interpreted as probability amplitudes, wave functions in relativistic quantum mechanics have generalized meanings such as charge-density amplitudes, energy-density…
In the first part of the paper I argue that an ontology of events is precise, flexible and general enough so as to cover the three main alternative formulations of quantum mechanics as well as theories advocating an antirealistic view of…
We begin by discussing ``What exists?'', i.e. ontology, in Classical Physics which provided a description of physical phenomena at the macroscopic level. The microworld however necessitates a introduction of Quantum ideas for its…
The intrinsic fluctuations of the underlying, immutable quantum fields that fill all space and time can support the element of reality of a wave function in quantum mechanics. The mysterious non-locality of quantum entanglement may also be…
Generally a central role has been assigned to an unavoidable physical interaction between the measuring instrument and the physical entity measured in the change in the wave function that often occurs in measurement in quantum mechanics. A…
A textbook interpretation of quantum physics is that quantum objects can be described in a particle or a wave picture, depending on the operations and measurements performed. Beyond this widely held believe, we demonstrate in this…
A hypothetical formulation of quantum mechanics is presented so as to reconcile it with macro-realism. On the analogy drawn from thermodynamics, an objective description of wave packet reduction is postulated, in which a characteristic…
The mathematical structure of realist quantum theories has given rise to a debate about how our ordinary 3-dimensional space is related to the 3N-dimensional configuration space on which the wave function is defined. Which of the two spaces…
Contrary to classical physics, which was strongly objective i.e. could be interpreted as a description of mind-independent reality, standard quantum mechanics (SQM) is only weakly objective, that is to say, its statements, though…
During many years since the birth of quantum mechanics, instrumentalist interpretations prevailed: the meaning of the theory was expressed in terms of measurements results. But in the last decades, several attempts to interpret it from a…
Signal analysis is built upon various resolutions of the identity in signal vector spaces, e.g. Fourier, Gabor, wavelets, etc. Similar resolutions are used as quantizers of functions or distributions, paving the way to a time-frequency or…
Since quantum mechanics (QM) was formulated, many voices have claimed this to be the basis of free will in the human beings. Basically, they argue that free will is possible because there is an ontological indeterminism in the natural laws,…
In this article we present a possible way to make usual quantum mechanics fully compatible with physical realism, defined as the statement that the goal of physics is to study entities of the natural world, existing independently from any…
Schroedinger's wave function shows many aspects of a state of incomplete knowledge or information ("bit"): (1) it is usually defined on a space of classical configurations, (2) its generic entanglement is, therefore, analogous to…