Related papers: Against "Reality" in Physics
The epistemological interpretation of quantum mechanics is still in an unacceptable status. This becomes obvious if looking on the variety of interpretations currently under discussion. However, the physical community together with…
The Einstein-Podolsky-Rosen argument on quantum mechanics incompleteness is formulated in terms of elements of reality inferred from joint (as opposed to alternative) measurements, in two examples involving entangled states of three…
The quantum reality problem is that of finding a mathematically precise definition of a sample space of configurations of beables, events, histories, paths, or other mathematical objects, and a corresponding probability distribution, for…
First, this article considers the nature of quantum reality (the reality responsible for quantum phenomena) and the concept of realism (our ability to represent this reality) in quantum theory, in conjunction with the roles of locality,…
Some notes about quantum physics, an interpretation if one wishes, are put forward, insisting on `closely following the mathematics/formalism, the `nuts and bolts of what quantum physics says'. These, basically well-known, issues seem to…
Contrary to classical physics, which was strongly objective i.e. could be interpreted as a description of mind-independent reality, standard quantum mechanics (SQM) is only weakly objective, that is to say, its statements, though…
The debate instigated by the seminal works of Einstein, Podolsky, Rosen, and Bell, put the notions of realism and nonlocality at the core of almost all philosophical and physical discussions underlying the foundations of quantum mechanics.…
The ``Hard Problem" of consciousness refers to a long-standing enigma about how qualia emerge from physical processes in the brain. Building on insights from the development of non-Euclidean geometry, this paper seeks to present a…
All investigators working on the foundations of quantum mechanics agree that the theory has profoundly modified our conception of reality. But there ends the consensus. The unproblematic formalism of the theory gives rise to a number of…
In the Schr\"odinger-cat gedanken experiment a cat is in a quantum superposition of two macroscopically distinct states, alive and dead.The paradoxical interpretation of quantum mechanics is that the cat is not in one state or the other,…
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…
A discussion of the quantum mechanical use of superposition or entangled states shows that descriptions containing only statements about state vectors and experiments outputs are the most suitable for Quantum Mechanics. In particular, it is…
Quantum mechanics is a fundamentally probabilistic theory (at least so far as the empirical predictions are concerned). It follows that, if one wants to properly understand quantum mechanics, it is essential to clearly understand the…
Heisenberg, Bohr and others were forced to renounce on the description of the objective reality as the aim of physics because of the paradoxical quantum phenomena observed on the atomic level. The contemporary quantum mechanics created on…
On the seminal paper written by Einstein, Podolsky and Rosen [1], a critique to the completeness of quantum mechanics was posed. Part of the critique consisted in the following argument: if quantum mechanics is complete, then, two physical…
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…
What ontology does realism about the quantum state suggest? The main extant view in contemporary philosophy of physics is wave-function realism. We elaborate the sense in which wave-function realism does provide an ontological picture; and…
Quantum theory in its conventional formulation is notoriously subject to various measurement-related paradoxes, as exemplified by the "Schrodinger's Cat" and "Wigner's Friend" thought experiments. It has been shown, for example by…
A new, realist interpretation of the quantum measurement processes is given. In this scenario a quantum measurement is a non-equilibrium phase transition in a ``resonant cavity'' formed by the entire physical universe including all its…
The Einstein, Podolski and Rosen (EPR) argument aiming to prove the incompleteness of quantum mechanics (QM) was opposed by most EPR's contemporary physicists and is not accepted within the standard interpretation of QM, which maintains…