Related papers: Quantum histories without contrary inferences
The formalism for histories-based generalized quantum mechanics developed in two earlier papers is applied to the treatment of histories (of particles or fields or more general objects) in curved spacetimes (which need not admit foliation…
It is shown how all the major conceptual difficulties of standard (textbook) quantum mechanics, including the two measurement problems and the (supposed) nonlocality that conflicts with special relativity, are resolved in the consistent or…
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…
An introduction is given to an algebraic formulation and generalisation of the consistent histories approach to quantum theory. The main technical tool in this theory is an orthoalgebra of history propositions that serves as a generalised…
A system of quantum reasoning for a closed system is developed by treating non-relativistic quantum mechanics as a stochastic theory. The sample space corresponds to a decomposition, as a sum of orthogonal projectors, of the identity…
The theory of decoherent histories is checked for the requirement of statistical independence of subsystems. Strikingly, this is satisfied only when the decoherence functional is diagonal in both its real a n d imaginary parts. In…
Quantum theory provides an extremely accurate description of fundamental processes in physics. It thus seems likely that the theory is applicable beyond the, mostly microscopic, domain in which it has been tested experimentally. Here we…
The usual formulation of quantum theory is rather abstract. In recent work I have shown that we can, nevertheless, obtain quantum theory from five reasonable axioms. Four of these axioms are obviously consistent with both classical…
We introduce a new notion of consistency for 2-events quantum histories, based on the concept of mirror projection. Contrary to all notions of consistency so far introduced, our consistency, named self-decoherence, is an individual…
Nonnegative probabilities that obey the sum rules may be assigned to a much wider family of sets of histories than decohering histories. The resulting {\it linearly positive histories} avoid the highly restrictive decoherence conditions and…
We illustrate the crucial role played by decoherence (consistency of quantum histories) in extracting consistent quantum probabilities for alternative histories in quantum cosmology. Specifically, within a Wheeler-DeWitt quantization of a…
An approach to the foundations of quantum theory is advertised that proceeds by "reverse engineering" quantum field theory. As a concrete instance of this approach, the general boundary formulation of quantum theory is outlined.
This paper discusses the question of Stable Facts in Relational Quantum Mechanics. I examine how the approach to quantum logic in the consistent histories formalism can be used to clarify what information about a system can be shared…
The issue of irreversibility in a universe with time-reversal-symmetric laws is a central problem in physics. % , and, in particular, to statistical mechanics, information theory and quantum thermodynamics. In this letter, we discuss for…
The fundamental dynamics of quantum particles is neutral with respect to the arrow of time. And yet, our experiments are not: we observe quantum systems evolving from the past to the future, but not the other way round. A fundamental…
Motivated by the advances of quantum Darwinism and recognizing the role played by redundancy in identifying the small subset of quantum states with resilience characteristic of objective classical reality, we explore the implications of…
The classical methods used by recursion theory and formal logic to block paradoxes do not work in quantum information theory. Since quantum information can exist as a coherent superposition of the classical ``yes'' and ``no'' states,…
The incompatibility between the treatment of time in the classical and in the quantum theory results in the so-called problem of time in canonical quantum gravity. For this reason, attempts have been made to devise algorithms of…
The Consistent Histories (CH) formalism aims at a quantum mechanical framework which could be applied even to the universe as a whole. CH stresses the importance of histories for quantum mechanics, as opposed to measurements, and maintains…
Although quantum coherence is a basic trait of quantum mechanics, the presence of coherences in the quantum description of a certain phenomenon does not rule out the possibility to give an alternative description of the same phenomenon in…