Related papers: What are Physical States?
Applications of quantum mechanics have led to many successful predictions and explanations of puzzling phenomena, and we now apply quantum mechanics to gain, process, and communicate information in novel ways. We can understand quantum…
Quantum mechanics is derived from the principle that the universe contain as much variety as possible, in the sense of maximizing the distinctiveness of each subsystem. The quantum state of a microscopic system is defined to correspond to…
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…
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…
The fundamental physical theories that interpret and explain behaviour of matter in nature are dependent on several unobservables and insensibles in their construction. While a rigorous natural philosophy cannot take them for granted, there…
The quantum state \psi is a mathematical object used to determine the probabilities of different outcomes when measuring a physical system. Its fundamental nature has been the subject of discussions since the inception of quantum theory: is…
The paper attempts to convince that the orthodox interpretation of quantum mechanics does not contradict philosophical realism by throwing light onto certain properties of quantum systems that seem to have escaped attention as yet. The…
Since its emergence, quantum mechanics has been a challenge for an understanding of reality which is based on our intuition in a classical world. Nevertheless, it has often been tried to impose this understanding of reality on quantum…
Perhaps the quantum state represents information about reality, and not reality directly. Wave function collapse is then possibly no more mysterious than a Bayesian update of a probability distribution given new data. We consider models for…
Bohmian mechanics is a theory that provides a consistent explanation of quantum phenomena in terms of point particles whose motion is guided by the wave function. In this theory, the state of a system of particles is defined by the actual…
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…
In this article we argue that in quantum mechanics, and in opposition to classical physics, it is impossible to say that an isolated quantum system "owns" a physical property. Some properties of the system, its mass for example, belong to…
Every quantum physical system can be considered the ''shadow'' of a special kind of classical system. The system proposed here is classical mainly because each observable function has a well precise value on each state of the system: an…
In this article we present a possible way to make usual quantum mechanics fully compatible with physical realism, defined as the statement that the goal of physics is to study entities of the natural world, existing independently from any…
The physical states of matter and fields are represented in the quantum theory with complex valued wavefunctions, or more generally by quantum states in an abstract linear vector space. Determining the physical nature of wavefunctions…
It is possible to completely explain all aspects of quantum mechanics by expressing the relations between physical properties in terms of complex conditional probabilities (Phys. Rev. A 89, 042115(2014)). These fully deterministic…
In this paper, we investigate a characterization of Quantum Mechanics by two physical principles based on general probabilistic theories. We first give the operationally motivated definition of the physical equivalence of states and…
Every quantum state can be represented as a probability distribution over the outcomes of an informationally complete measurement. But not all probability distributions correspond to quantum states. Quantum state space may thus be thought…
A 'state property system' is the mathematical structure which models an arbitrary physical system by means of its set of states, its set of properties, and a relation of 'actuality of a certain property for a certain state'. We work out a…
It has been suggested, on the one hand, that quantum states are just states of knowledge; and, on the other, that quantum theory is merely a theory of correlations. These suggestions are confronted with problems about the nature of…