Related papers: The Logic of Experimental Tests, Particularly of E…
I argue that the Oxford school Everett interpretation is internally incoherent, because we cannot claim that in an Everettian universe the kinds of reasoning we have used to arrive at our beliefs about quantum mechanics would lead us to…
Testing hypotheses is an issue of primary importance in the scientific research, as well as in many other human activities. Much clarification about it can be achieved if the process of learning from data is framed in a stochastic model of…
No theory of physics has been collectively scientifically verified in an experiment so far. It is pointed out that probabilistic structure of quantum theory can be collectively scientifically verified in an experiment. It is also argued…
It is shown that the basic equations of quantum theory can be obtained from a straightforward application of logical inference to experiments for which there is uncertainty about individual events and for which the frequencies of the…
It is generally accepted that Everett's theory of quantum mechanics cannot be experimentally tested as such experiment would involve operations on the observer which are beyond our current technology. We propose an alternative to test…
Quantum computation teaches us that quantum mechanics exhibits exponential complexity. We argue that the standard scientific paradigm of "predict and verify" cannot be applied to testing quantum mechanics in this limit of high complexity.…
We review recent work that employs the framework of logical inference to establish a bridge between data gathered through experiments and their objective description in terms of human-made concepts. It is shown that logical inference…
In this brief note, we argue that contrarily to what is still often stated, the Everett many-worlds interpretation of quantum mechanics is not in principle impossible to test. It is actually not more difficult (but not easier either) to…
Given the well-known and fundamental problems with hypothesis testing via classical (point-form) significance tests, there has been a general move to alternative approaches, often focused on the Bayesian t-test. We show that the Bayesian…
Bounds on quantum probabilities and expectation values are derived for experimental setups associated with Bell-type inequalities. In analogy to the classical bounds, the quantum limits are experimentally testable and therefore serve as…
Quantum mechanics is one of our most successful physical theories; its predictions agree with experimental observations to an extremely high accuracy. However, the bare formalism of quantum theory does not provide straightforward answers to…
Bayesian hypothesis testing is re-examined from the perspective of an a priori assessment of the test statistic distribution under the alternative. By assessing the distribution of an observable test statistic, rather than prior parameter…
Quantum theory can be viewed as a generalization of classical probability theory, but the analogy as it has been developed so far is not complete. Whereas the manner in which inferences are made in classical probability theory is…
It is argued that the traditional "realist" methodology of physics, according to which human concepts, laws and theories can grasp the essence of reality, is incompatible with the most fruitful interpretation of quantum formalism. The proof…
If the history of science has taught us anything, it's that persistence and creativity makes the once impossible possible. It has long been thought experimental tests of quantum gravity are impossible. But during the last decade, several…
Having analyzed the formal aspects of Wallace's proof of the Born rule, we now discuss the concepts and axioms upon which it is built. Justification for most axioms is shown to be problematic, and at times contradictory. Some of the…
Modern physics is founded on two mainstays: mathematical modelling and empirical verification. These two assumptions are prerequisite for the objectivity of scientific discourse. Here we show, however, that they are contradictory, leading…
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 conventional postulate for the probabilistic interpretation of quantum mechanics is asymmetric in preparation and measurement, making retrodiction reliant on inference by use of Bayes' theorem. Here, a more fundamental symmetric…
Physics has long lived with a schizophrenia that desires determinism for measured systems while demanding that experimenters decide what to measure on a whim. Intriguingly, such a free will assumption for experimenters has thwarted many…