Related papers: What are Physical States?
The nature of a physical law is examined, and it is suggested that there may not be any fundamental dynamical laws. This explains the intrinsic indeterminism of quantum theory. The probabilities for transition from a given initial state to…
Quantum "states" are objective probability measures. Because their dependence on a time is not the time dependence of an evolving state, they are neither states of Nature nor "states of knowledge." There is no such thing as an evolving…
We propose a novel interpretation of Quantum Mechanics, which can resolve the outstanding conflict between the principles of locality and realism and offers new insight on the so-called weak values of physical observables. The discussion is…
It is argued that any possible definition of a realistic physics theory -- i.e., a mathematical model representing the real world -- cannot be considered comprehensive unless it is supplemented with requirement of being computationally…
The subject of this thesis are various properties of quantum states that make them "non-classical" and their behaviour under unitary operations. In chapter 2 some basic concepts of quantum mechanics and quantum information are reviewed. In…
The implications of the physical theory of quantum mechanics on the question of realism is much a subject of sustaining interest, while the background questions among physicists on how to think about all the theoretical notion and…
In this paper we consider theories in which reality is described by some underlying variables. Each value these variables can take represents an ontic state (a particular state of reality). The preparation of a quantum state corresponds to…
The theories of pre-quantum physics are standardly seen as representing physical systems and their properties. Quantum mechanics in its standard form is a more problematic case: here, interpretational problems have led to doubts about the…
The development of quantum information theory has renewed interest in the idea that the state vector does not represent the state of a quantum system, but rather the knowledge or information that we may have on the system. I argue that this…
A controversy that has arisen many times over in disparate contexts is whether quantum coherences between eigenstates of certain quantities are fact or fiction. We present a pedagogical introduction to the debate in the form of a…
We can recognize two modes in which 'quantum appears' in macro domains: (i) a 'micro-physical appearance', where quantum laws are assumed to be universal and they are transferred from the micro to the macro level if suitable 'quantum…
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…
What is the quantum state of the universe? Although there have been several interesting suggestions, the question remains open. In this paper, I consider a natural choice for the universal quantum state arising from the Past Hypothesis, a…
We give a review of concepts related to connection of classical and quantum theories, from the phase space perspective. Quantum theory is described by non-commutative operators of coordinates and momenta, results in values having a certain…
We argue that the so-called entangled states in quantum theory are not something exceptional, deserving a special attention in our efforts to understand conceptual foundations of quantum world. They appear by constructing the basis states…
The quantum state is a mathematical object used to determine the outcome probabilities of measurements on physical systems. Its fundamental nature has been the subject of discussions since the origin of the theory: is it ontic, that is,…
Essential elements of quantum theory are derived from an epistemic point of view, i.e., the viewpoint that thetheory has to do with what can be said about nature. This gives a relationship to statistical reasoning and to other areas of…
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…
In the conventional formulation of quantum mechanics, the initial description is given only for the physical system under study. It factors out the state for the experimenter. We argue that such description is incomplete and can lead to…
I explore whether it is possible to make sense of the quantum mechanical description of physical reality by taking the proper subject of physics to be correlation and only correlation, and by separating the problem of understanding the…