Related papers: The Quantum Wavefunction
For decades, researchers have sought to understand how the irreversibility of the surrounding world emerges from the seemingly time symmetric, fundamental laws of physics. Quantum mechanics conjectured a clue that final irreversibility is…
The erroneous prediction of the speed of light in dispersive media has been looked upon historically as unequivocal proof that Newton's corpuscular theory is incorrect. Examination of his arguments shows that they were only directly…
A common learning goal for modern physics instructors is for students to recognize a difference between the experimental uncertainty of classical physics and the fundamental uncertainty of quantum mechanics. Our studies suggest this…
We present an improved version of Berry's ansatz able to incorporate exactly the existence of boundaries and the correct normalization of the eigenfunction into an ensemble of random waves. We then reformulate the Random Wave conjecture…
Humans gain an implicit understanding of physical laws through observing and interacting with the world. Endowing an autonomous agent with an understanding of physical laws through experience and observation is seldom practical: we should…
Interpretations of key concepts, such as uncertainty relations, kinetic energy, value of an observable, probability distributions, the projection or collapse of a wave function postulate, and discrete versus continuous values, that appear…
States in quantum field theory (QFT) are represented by many-particle wave functions, such that a state describing n particles depends on n spacetime positions. Since a general state is a superposition of states with different numbers of…
The relativistic quantum equation is proposed for the complex wave function, which has the meaning of a probability amplitude. The Lagrangian formulation of the proposed theory is developed. The problem of spreading of a wave packet in an…
Among several possibilities for what reality could be like in view of the empirical facts of quantum mechanics, one is provided by theories of spontaneous wave function collapse, the best known of which is the Ghirardi-Rimini-Weber (GRW)…
We present a uniform framework for the treatment of a large class of toy models of quantum theory. Specifically, we will be interested in theories of wavefunctions valued in commutative involutive semirings, and which give rise to some…
Einstein's special theory of relativity starts with assumptions about how observations conducted in relatively moving inertial frames must compare. From these assumptions, conclusions can be drawn regarding the laws of physics in any one…
We argue that quantum mechanics makes sense without such controversial postulates as the wave function collapse, the quantum probability rule and the observable postulate. We only need the existence of a wave function as a representation of…
This interpretation establishes a completely classical ontology -- only the classical trajectory in configuration space -- and interprets the wave function as describing incomplete information (in form of a probability flow) about this…
Every quantum physical system can be considered the ''shadow'' of a special kind of classical system. The system proposed here is classical mainly because each observable function has a well precise value on each state of the system: an…
Quantum theory makes the most accurate empirical predictions and yet it lacks simple, comprehensible physical principles from which the theory can be uniquely derived. A broad class of probabilistic theories exist which all share some…
I give a pedagogical explanation of what it is about quantization that makes general relativity go from being a nearly perfect classical theory to a very problematic quantum one. I also explain why some quantization of gravity is…
Our assumption that spacetime is a continuum leads to many challenges in mathematical physics. Singularities, divergent integrals and the like threaten many of our favorite theories, from Newtonian gravity to classical electrodynamics,…
The fundamental laws of physics are time-symmetric, but our macroscopic experience contradicts this. The time reversibility paradox is partly a consequence of the unpredictability of Newton's equations of motion. We measure the dependence…
Newton's action at a distance gravitational law and Coulomb's action at a distance electrostatic law had to be reexamined in the light of field theories which originated from Maxwell's electrodynamics. These ideas were further modified with…
The Schrodinger equation has been considered to be a postulate of quantum physics, but it is also perceived and derived heuristically as the quantum equivalent of the classical energy relation. We indicate that the Schrodinger equation…