Related papers: Beyond Complementarity
By rigorously formalizing the Einstein-Podolsky-Rosen (EPR) argument, and Bohr's reply, one can appreciate that both arguments were technically correct. Their opposed conclusions about the completeness of quantum mechanics hinged upon an…
Contrary to the widespread belief, the problem of the emergence of classical mechanics from quantum mechanics is still open. In spite of many results on the $\h \to 0$ asymptotics, it is not yet clear how to explain within standard quantum…
The concept of complementarity, originally defined for non-commuting observables of quantum systems with states of non-vanishing dispersion, is extended to classical dynamical systems with a partitioned phase space. Interpreting partitions…
Complementarity was originally introduced as a qualitative concept for the discussion of properties of quantum mechanical objects that are classically incompatible. More recently, complementarity has become a \emph{quantitative} relation…
A source of much difficulty and confusion in the interpretation of quantum mechanics is a ``naive realism about operators.'' By this we refer to various ways of taking too seriously the notion of operator-as-observable, and in particular to…
There is a widespread belief that the classical small inhomogeneities which gave rise to all structures in the Universe through gravitational instability originated from primordial quantum cosmological fluctuations. However, this transition…
Feynman's light microscope invites us to reconsider what we thought we knew about quantum reality. Rather than invoking wavefunction collapse to predict the loss of fringes in a monitored interferometer, Feynman analyzes the problem in…
This paper provides an algebraic reconstruction of Einstein's own argument for the incompleteness of quantum mechanics -- the one that he thought did not make it into the EPR paper -- in order to clarify the assumptions that underlie an…
Left on its own, a quantum state evolves deterministically under the Schr\"odinger Equation, forming superpositions. Upon measurement, however, a stochastic process governed by the Born rule collapses it to a single outcome. This dual…
After about a century since the first attempts by Bohr, the interpretation of quantum theory is still a field with many open questions. In this article a new interpretation of quantum theory is suggested, motivated by philosophical…
Quantum theory is a tremendously successful physical theory, but nevertheless suffers from two serious problems: the measurement problem and the problem of interpretational underdetermination. The latter, however, is largely overlooked as a…
This paper outlines the common ground between the motivations lying behind Hans Primas' algebraic approach to quantum phenomena and those lying behind David Bohm's approach which led to his notion of implicate/explicate order. This…
In this work we argue against the interpretation that underlies the "Standard" account of Quantum Mechanics (SQM) that was established during the 1930s by Niels Bohr and Paul Dirac. Ever since, following this orthodox narrative, physicists…
The relationship between classical and quantum theory is of central importance to the philosophy of physics, and any interpretation of quantum mechanics has to clarify it. Our discussion of this relationship is partly historical and…
The positivistic assumptions of determinism and objectivism in the realm of Newtonian mechanics are questioned in this paper. While objectivism is only challenged through proposing the mildest form of subjectivism, determinism is…
I will propose that the reality to which the quantum formalism implicitly refers is a kind of generalized history, the word history having here the same meaning as in the phrase sum-over-histories. This proposal confers a certain…
In quantum physics, the notion of contextuality has a variety of interpretations which are typically associated with the names of their inventors, say Bohr, Bell, Kochen and Specker, and recently Dzhafarov. In fact, Bohr was the first who…
We reconsider a well known problem of quantum theory, i.e. the so called measurement (or macro-objectification) problem, and we rederive the fact that it gives rise to serious problems of interpretation. The novelty of our approach derives…
Developing an earlier proposal (Ne'eman, Damnjanovic, etc), we show herein that there is a Landau continuous phase transition from the exact quantum dynamics to the effectively classical one, occurring via spontaneous superposition breaking…
Some recent works have introduced a quantum twist to the concept of complementarity, exemplified by a setup in which the which-way detector is in a superposition of being present and absent. It has been argued that such experiments allow…