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The centuries-long practice of the teaching turned mechanics into an academic construct detached from its underlying science, the physics of macroscopic bodies. In particular, the regularities that delineate the scope of validity of…
The gap between classical mechanics and quantum mechanics has an important interpretive implication: the Universe must have an irreducible fundamental level, which determines the properties of matter at higher levels of organization. We…
The standard presentation of the principles of quantum mechanics is critically reviewed both from the experimental/operational point and with respect to the request of mathematical consistency and logical economy. A simpler and more…
Five physical assumptions are proposed that together entail the general qualitative results, including the Born rule, of non-relativistic quantum mechanics by physical and information-theoretic reasoning alone. Two of these assumptions…
In deterministic theories, one can start from a set of ontological states to formulate the dynamical laws, but these may not be directly observable. Observable are only equivalence classes of states, and these will span a basis of…
The equations of motion for electromechanical systems are traced back to the fundamental Lagrangian of particles and electromagnetic fields, via the Darwin Lagrangian. When dissipative forces can be neglected the systems are conservative…
This is the first chapter of a new and unconventional textbook on quantum mechanics and quantum field theory. The chapter introduces standard quantum mechanics by means of a symmetry principle, without reference to classical mechanics. The…
It is pointed out that recent cosmological findings seem to support the view that the mass/energy distribution of the universe defines the Newtonian inertial frames as originally suggested by Mach. The background concepts of inertial frame,…
A version of quantum theory is derived from a set of plausible assumptions related to the following general setting: For a given system there is a set of experiments that can be performed, and for each such experiment an ordinary…
In the well known Copenhagen interpretation of Quantum mechanics, advocated by N. Bohr, the physical objects and the experimental results can be described only in a macroscopic language, leaving any possible microscopic description as…
We reformulate the problem of the "interpretation of quantum mechanics" as the problem of DERIVING the quantum mechanical formalism from a set of simple physical postulates. We suggest that the common unease with taking quantum mechanics as…
Quantum mechanics is reformulated using Hartle's definition of the state of an individual physical system and a variant of von Neumann's propositional calculus. An elementary set of quantum postulates lead inductively to the familiar…
A "minimal" generalization of Quantum Mechanics is proposed, where the Lagrangian or the action functional is a mapping from the (classical) states of a system to the Lie algebra of a general compact Lie group, and the wave function takes…
As it is well known, classical mechanics consists of several basic features like determinism, reductionism, completeness of knowledge and mechanicism. In this article the basic assumptions are discussed which underlie those features. It is…
The objective of this series of three papers is to axiomatically derive quantum mechanics from classical mechanics and two other basic axioms. In this first paper, Schreodinger's equation for the density matrix is fist obtained and from it…
Classical, Quantum, Relativistic and Statistical: the four branches of mechanics. However, the Quattro Donna of Physics disagree even about the entities that are supposed to be fundamental, such as space, matter and time. In order to search…
The action principle is frequently used to derive the classical equations of motion. The action may also be used to associate group elements with curves in the space-time manifold, similar to the gauge transformations. The action principle…
We develop a dynamical theory, based on a system of ordinary differential equations describing the motion of particles which reproduces the results of quantum mechanics. The system generalizes the Hamilton equations of classical mechanics…
A foundation of quantum mechanics based on the concepts of focusing and symmetry is proposed. Focusing is connected to c-variables - inaccessible conceptually derived variables; several examples of such variables are given. The focus is…
Quantum mechanics, one of the most successful theories in the history of science, was created to account for physical systems not describable by classical physics. Though it is consistent with all experiments conducted thus far, many of its…