Related papers: The issue with the initial state in quantum mechan…
A formulation of quantum mechanics, which begins by postulating assertions for individual physical systems, is given. The statistical predictions of quantum mechanics for infinite ensembles are then derived from its assertions for…
Two proofs are presented which show that quantum mechanics is incompatible with the following assumption: all possible correlations between subsystems of an individual isolated composite quantum system are contained in the initial quantum…
Is quantum mechanics about 'states'? Or is it basically another kind of probability theory? It is argued that the elementary formalism of quantum mechanics operates as a well-justified alternative to 'classical' instantiations of a…
If the block universe view is correct, the future and the past have similar status and one would expect physical theories to involve final as well as initial boundary conditions. A plausible consistency condition between the initial and…
The notion of "closed systems" in Quantum Mechanics is discussed. For this purpose, we study two models of a quantum-mechanical system $P$ spatially far separated from the "rest of the universe" $Q$. Under reasonable assumptions on the…
It is often stated that quantum mechanics only makes statistical predictions and that a quantum state is described by the various probability distributions associated with it. Can we describe a quantum state completely in terms of…
One of the most central and controversial element of quantum mechanics is the use of non zero vectors of a Hilbert space (or, more generally, of one dimension subspaces) for representing the state of a quantum system. In particular, the…
In physical theories, boundary or initial conditions play the role of selecting special situations which can be described by a theory with its general laws. Cosmology has long been suspected to be different in that its fundamental theory…
In quantum physics, the density operator completely describes the state. Instead, in classical physics the mean value of every physical quantity is evaluated by means of a probability distribution. We study the possibility to describe pure…
In its standard formulation, quantum mechanics presents a very serious inconvenience: given a quantum system, there is no possibility at all to unambiguously (causally) connect a particular feature of its final state with some specific…
According to quantum theory, pure physical states correspond to equivalence classes of state vectors, where any two members of one class differ by a complex factor. The point is that such a factor does not change the probability for the…
We attempt to contribute some novel points of view to the "foundations of quantum mechanics", using mathematical tools from "quantum probability theory" (such as the theory of operator algebras). We first introduce an abstract algebraic…
We discuss experimental situations that consist of multiple preparation and measurement stages. This leads us to a new approach to quantum mechanics. In particular, we introduce the idea of multi-time quantum states which are the…
Quantum states are the key mathematical objects in quantum theory. It is therefore surprising that physicists have been unable to agree on what a quantum state truly represents. One possibility is that a pure quantum state corresponds…
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…
We introduce a new mathematical framework for the probabilistic description of an experiment on a system of any type in terms of information representing this system initially. Based on the notions of an information state and a generalized…
For an arbitrary preparation, quantum mechanical descriptions refer to the complementary contexts set by incompatible measurements. We argue that an arbitrary preparation, therefore, should be described with respect to such a context by its…
This review, of the understanding of quantum mechanics, is broad in scope, and aims to reflect enough of the literature to be representative of the current state of the subject. To enhance clarity, the main findings are presented in the…
A suitable unified statistical formulation of quantum and classical mechanics in a *-algebraic setting leads us to conclude that information itself is noncommutative in quantum mechanics. Specifically we refer here to an observer's…
The so-called "free will axiom" is an essential ingredient in many discussions concerning hidden variables in quantum mechanics. In this paper we argue that "free will" can be defined in different ways. The definition usually employed is…