Related papers: Quantum Mechanical Foundations of Epistemology
The act of describing how a physical process changes a system is the basis for understanding observed phenomena. For quantum-mechanical processes in particular, the affect of processes on quantum states profoundly advances our knowledge of…
When investigating theories at the tiniest conceivable scales in nature, almost all researchers today revert to the quantum language, accepting the verdict from the Copenhagen doctrine that the only way to describe what is going on will…
After the development of a self-consistent quantum formalism nearly a century ago there began a quest for how to interpret the theoretical constructs of the formalism. In fact, the pursuit of new interpretations of quantum mechanics…
One of the most important problems in Physics is how to reconcile Quantum Mechanics with General Relativity. Some authors have suggested that this may be realized at the expense of having to drop the quantum formalism in favor of a more…
I flesh out the sense in which the informational approach to interpreting quantum mechanics, as defended by Pitowsky and Bub and lately by a number of other authors, is (neo-)Bohrian. I argue that on this approach, quantum mechanics…
Epistemological consequences of quantum nonlocality (entanglement) are discussed under the assumption of a universally valid Schr\"odinger equation in the absence of hidden variables. This leads inevitably to a {\it many-minds…
A homogeneous and isotropic cosmological model with a positive cosmological constant is considered. The matter sector is given by a massless scalar field, which can be used as an internal time to deparametrize the theory. The idea is to…
The so-called classical limit of quantum mechanics is generally studied in terms of the decoherence of the state operator that characterizes a system. This is not the only possible approach to decoherence. In previous works we have…
Quantum particles and classical particles are described in a common setting of classical statistical physics. The property of a particle being "classical" or "quantum" ceases to be a basic conceptual difference. The dynamics differs,…
The (consistent or decoherent) histories interpretation provides a consistent realistic ontology for quantum mechanics, based on two main ideas. First, a logic (system of reasoning) is employed which is compatible with the Hilbert-space…
The conventional interpretation of quantum mechanics, though it permits a correspondence to classical physics, leaves the exact mechanism of transition unclear. Though this was only of philosophical importance throughout the twentieth…
The quantum description of the microscopic world is incompatible with the classical description of the macroscopic world, both mathematically and conceptually. Nevertheless, it is generally accepted that classical mechanics emerges from…
Common observations of the unpredictability of human behavior and the influence of one question on the answer to another suggest social science experiments are probabilistic and may be mutually incompatible with one another, characteristics…
Three problems stand in the way of deriving classical theories from quantum mechanics: those of realist interpretation, of classical properties and of quantum measurement. Recently, we have identified some tacit assumptions that lie at the…
In the orthodox language of Quantum Mechanics the observer occupies a central position and the only "real events" are the measuring results. We argue here that this narrow view is not forced upon us by the lessons of Quantum Physics. An…
This work explores the connection between logical independence and the algebraic structure of quantum mechanics. Building on results by Brukner et al., it introduces the notion of \textit{onto-epistemic ignorance}: situations in which the…
A pedagogical introduction is given to the quantum mechanics of closed systems, most generally the universe as a whole. Quantum mechanics aims at predicting the probabilities of alternative coarse-grained time histories of a closed system.…
This paper discusses the relation between the decoherent histories approach to quantum mechanics that is based on coarse-grained decoherent histories of a closed system, and the approximate quantum mechanics of measured subsystems, as in…
In spite of all {\bf no-go} theorems (e.g., von Neumann, Kochen and Specker,..., Bell,...) we constructed a realist basis of quantum mechanics. In our model both classical and quantum spaces b are rough images of the fundamental {\bf…
It is first shown that when the Schr\"{o}dinger equation for a wave function is written in the polar form, complete information about the system's {\em quantum-ness} is separated out in a single term $Q$, the so called `quantum potential'.…