Related papers: Striving for Realism, not for Determinism: Histori…
David Bohm has put forward the first deterministic interpretation of quantum physics, and for this he seems to be regarded as a champion of determinism by physicists (both his contemporaries and the supporters of his interpretation, the…
Albert Einstein made fundamental contributions to the development of quantum mechanics. However, he was never satisfied with the quantum worldview. In fact, during most of his life he attempted to find inconsistencies and paradoxes within…
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…
Einstein's distinction between principle theories and constructive theories is methodological rather than metaphysical. Principle theories such as thermodynamics and relativity articulate empirically distilled constraints that delimit…
QBism is one of the main candidates for an epistemic interpretation of quantum mechanics. According to QBism, the quantum state or the wavefunction represents the subjective degrees of belief of the agent assigning the state. But, although…
Einstein's philosophy of physics (as clarified by Fine, Howard, and Held) was predicated on his Trennungsprinzip, a combination of separability and locality, without which he believed objectification, and thereby "physical thought" and…
There are two broad opposing classes of attitudes to reality (realist vs idealist, material vs mental) with corresponding attitudes to knowledge (objective vs subjective, scientific vs romantic). I argue that these attitudes can be…
Tim Maudlin has argued that the standard formulation of quantum mechanics fails to provide a clear ontology and dynamics and that the de Broglie--Bohm pilot-wave theory offers a better completion of the formalism, more in line with…
The reality of Bohm's intellectual journey is very different from what is often claimed by the proponents of "Bohmian Mechanics" and others as we will explain in this paper. He did not believe a mechanical explanation of quantum phenomena…
Without Niels Bohr, QBism would be nothing. But QBism is not Bohr. This paper attempts to show that, despite a popular misconception, QBism is no minor tweak to Bohr's interpretation of quantum mechanics. It is something quite distinct.…
A brief account of the world view of classical physics is given first. We then recapitulate as to why the Copenhagen interpretation of the quantum mechanics had to renounce most of the attractive features of the clasical world view such as…
In 1935 Einstein, Podolsky, and Rosen (EPR) published an important paper in which they claimed that the whole formalism of quantum mechanics together with what they called "Reality Criterion" imply that quantum mechanics cannot be complete.…
There are several important philosophical problems to which quantum mechanics is often said to have made significant contributions: - Determinism: quantum theory has been taken to refute determinism; -Free Will: in turn, this is thought to…
The main claim of the paper is that one can be 'realist' (in some sense) about quantum mechanics without requiring any form of realism about the wave function. We begin by discussing various forms of realism about the wave function, namely…
The spectacular successes of quantum physics have made it a commonplace to assert that we live in a quantum world. This idea seems to imply a kind of "quantum fundamentalism" according to which everything in the universe (if not the…
Many wave phenomena are related to interactions. Considering once neglected interactions in some cases, states of large objects and Newton's idea about measurement, we attempt to modify some concepts and principles of non-relativistic…
The standard claim that the Schr\"odinger and Heisenberg pictures of quantum mechanics are equivalent rests on the fact that they yield identical empirical predictions. This equivalence therefore assumes the instrumentalist worldview in…
We give a counter example to show that determinism as such is in contradiction to quantum mechanics. More precisely, we consider a simple quantum system and its environment, including the measurement device, and make the assumption that the…
Even if Einstein brought major contributions as a founder of quantum mechanics, he remained deeply unsatisfied with the bases of this structure he knew to be so efficient for physics. His critics are often known through his numerous…
David Bohm has often been considered unable to understand the meaning of the quantum revolution as well as its radical metaphysical implications. Similarly, his pilot-wave theory was negatively portrayed as an attempt to restore a classical…