Related papers: The Problem of Confirmation in the Everett Interpr…
Interpretational problems with quantum mechanics can be phrased precisely by only talking about empirically accessible information. This prompts a mathematical reformulation of quantum mechanics in terms of classical mechanics. We survey…
Doubts are raised concerning the usual interpretation of the alleged failure, by quantum mechanics, of the distributive law of classical logic. The difficulty raised by incompatible sets of observables is overcome within an epistemic…
The analysis of theory-confirmation generally takes the deductive form: show that a theory in conjunction with physical data and auxiliary hypotheses yield a prediction about phenomena; verify the prediction; provide a quantitative measure…
Quantum mechanics and the theory of gravity are presently not compatible. A particular question is whether gravity causes decoherence - an unavoidable source of noise. Several models for gravitational decoherence have been proposed, not all…
There are many ways we can not know. Even in systems that we created ourselves, as, for example, systems in mathematical logic, Go\"edel and Tarski's theorems impose limits on what we can know. As we try to speak of the real world, things…
Bohr's interpretation of quantum mechanics has been criticized as incoherent and opportunistic, and based on doubtful philosophical premises. If so Bohr's influence, in the pre-war period of 1927-1939, is the harder to explain, and the…
Quantum mechanics clearly violates the weak equivalence principle (WEP). This implies that quantum mechanics also violates the strong equivalence principle (SEP), as shown in this paper. Therefore a theory of quantum gravity may not be…
What would be the consequences if there were fundamental limits to our ability to experimentally explore the world? In this work we seriously consider this question. We assume the existence of statements whose truth value is not…
In view of experimentally obtainable resolutions, equal to the Compton wavelength of an electron, the conventional interpretation of quantum mechanics no longer seems to provide a sufficiently subtle tool. Based on the intrinsic properties…
Quantum gravity may have as much to tell us about the foundations and interpretation of quantum mechanics as it does about gravity. The Copenhagen interpretation of quantum mechanics and Everett's Relative State Formulation are…
In this paper we address the question of whether it is possible to obtain evidence that we are in a superposition of different worlds, as suggested by the relative state interpretation of quantum mechanics. We find that it is impossible to…
The decoherent (consistent) histories formalism has been proposed as a means of eliminating measurements as a fundamental concept in quantum mechanics. In this formalism, probabilities can be assigned to any description which satisfies a…
In the absence of empirical confirmation, scientists may judge a theory's chances of being viable based on a wide range of arguments. The paper argues that such arguments can differ substantially with regard to their structural similarly to…
The concept of an injective affine embedding of the quantum states into a set of classical states, i.e., into the set of the probability measures on some measurable space, as well as its relation to statistically complete observables is…
A pedagogical and reasonably self-contained introduction to the measurement problems in quantum mechanics and their partial solution by environment-induced decoherence (plus some other important aspects of dcoherence) is given. The point…
Due to the absence of an external, classical time variable, the probabilistic predictions of covariant quantum theory are ambiguous when multiple measurements are considered. Here, we introduce an information theoretic framework to the…
Einstein initially objected to the probabilistic aspect of quantum mechanics - the idea that God is playing at dice. Later he changed his ground, and focussed instead on the point that the Copenhagen Interpretation leads to what Einstein…
In physics, there is the prevailing intuition that we are part of a unique external world, and that the goal of physics is to understand and describe this world. This assumption of the fundamentality of objective reality is often seen as a…
Applications of quantum mechanics have led to many successful predictions and explanations of puzzling phenomena, and we now apply quantum mechanics to gain, process, and communicate information in novel ways. We can understand quantum…
The Wigner's friend thought experiment was intended to illustrate the difficulty one has in describing an agent as a quantum system when that agent performs a measurement. While it does pose a challenge to the orthodox interpretation of…