Related papers: Against "Reality" in Physics
In recent decades there has been a resurge of interest in the foundations of quantum theory, partly motivated by new experimental techniques, partly by the emerging field of quantum information science. Old questions, asked since the…
We use a simple example to illustrate why it is not possible to consider that a measurement reveals an underlying objective reality of a property of a quantum system, that continues the same after the measurement is performed. This kind of…
Bell's theorem has fascinated physicists and philosophers since his 1964 paper, which was written in response to the 1935 paper of Einstein, Podolsky, and Rosen. Bell's theorem and its many extensions have led to the claim that quantum…
Scientific realism is the philosophical stance that science tracks truth, in particular in its depiction of the world's ontology. Ontologically, this involves a commitment to the existence of entities posited by our best scientific…
Is the wave function a physical reality traveling through our apparatus? Is it a real wave, or it is only a mathematical tool for calculating probabilities of results of measurements? Different interpretations of the quantum mechanics (QM)…
In a recent result, Frauchiger and Renner argue that if quantum theory accurately describes complex systems like observers who perform measurements, then "we are forced to give up the view that there is one single reality." Following a…
Paul Busch has emphasized on various occasions the importance for physics of going beyond a merely instrumentalist view of quantum mechanics. Even if we cannot be sure that any particular realist interpretation describes the world as it…
We still lack any consensus about what one is actually talking about as one uses quantum mechanics. There is a gap between the abstract terms in which the theory is couched and the phenomena the theory enables each of us to account for so…
Ever since its foundations were laid nearly a century ago, quantum theory has provoked questions about the very nature of reality. We address these questions by considering the universe, and the multiverse, fundamentally as complex…
The concept of ``elements of reality" is analyzed within the framework of quantum theory. It is shown that elements of reality fail to fulfill the product rule. This is the core of recent proofs of the impossibility of a Lorentz-invariant…
We begin by discussing ``What exists?'', i.e. ontology, in Classical Physics which provided a description of physical phenomena at the macroscopic level. The microworld however necessitates a introduction of Quantum ideas for its…
The persistent debate about the reality of a quantum state has recently come under limelight because of its importance to quantum information and the quantum computing community. Almost all of the deliberations are taking place using the…
Classical physics and quantum physics suggest two meta-physical types of reality: the classical notion of a objectively definite reality with properties "all the way down," and the quantum notion of an objectively indefinite type of…
I take a pragmatist perspective on quantum theory. This is not a view of the world described by quantum theory. In this view quantum theory itself does not describe the physical world, nor our observatons, experiences or opinions of it.…
Quantum effects and, in particular, entanglement are by now widely recognized in all areas of physics and related fields. However, we feel that the precise notion of entanglement---though mathematically well-defined---still generates…
This paper is the answer to the paper by Kastner [Found. Phys., to be published, quant-ph/9807037] in which she continued the criticism of the counterfactual usage of the Aharonov-Bergman-Lebowitz rule in the framework of the…
To get out of logical deadlock in interpreting gedanken experiments like Schrodinger cat, actual meaning of a wave function, or a state, in the case of complex two-dimensional Hilbert space, is shown to represent transformations executing…
Correlations are a very important tool in the study of multipartite systems, both for classical and quantum ones. The discussion about the quantum nature of correlations permeates Physics since Einstein, Podolski and Rosen published their…
Fundamental principle of classical physics -- local realism, means that freely chosen observations can be explained by a local (slower than light) real process. It is apparently violated in quantum mechanics as shown by Bell theorem.…
Stapp and others have proposed that reality involves a fundamental life process, or creative process. It is shown how this process description may be unified with the description that derives from quantum physics. The methods of the quantum…