Related papers: "B" is for Bohr
This paper puts forward an ontology that is indebted to QBism, Kant, Bohr, Schr\"odinger, the philosophy of the Upanishads, and the evolutionary philosophy of Sri Aurobindo. Central to it is that reality is relative to consciousness or…
It is now widely accepted that environmental entanglement and the resulting decoherence processes play a crucial role in the quantum-to-classical transition and the emergence of "classicality" from quantum mechanics. To this extent,…
No, but the paper argues that Bohr understood his correspondence principle, or at least an aspect of that principle expressed by the notion of rational generalization, as grounded in Hankel's principle of permanence, adapted to new…
The interpretation of quantum mechanics has been discussed since this theme first was brought up by Einstein and Bohr. This article describes a proposal for a new foundation of quantum theory, partly drawing upon ideas from statistical…
I consider the "Quantum Bayesian" view of quantum theory as expounded in a 2006 paper of Caves, Fuchs, and Schack. I argue that one can accept a generally personalist, decision-theoretic view of probability, including probability as…
It has been experimentally demonstrated that quantum coherence can persist in macroscopic phenomena [J.R. Friedman et al.,Nature, 406 (2000) 43]. To face the challenge of this new fact, in this article QM in its standard form is assumed to…
QBism has long recognized quantum states, POVM elements, Kraus operators, and even unitary operations to be cut from the same cloth: They express aspects of an agent's belief system concerning the consequences (for her) of actions she might…
At present, quantum theory leaves unsettled which quantities ontologically, physically exist in a quantum system. Do observables such as energy and position have meaningful values only at the precise moment of measurement, as in the…
QBism pursues the real by first eliminating the elements of quantum theory too fragile to be ontologies on their own. Thereafter, it seeks an "ontological lesson" from whatever remains. Here, we explore this program by highlighting three…
The relational approach to quantum states asserts that the physical description of quantum systems is always relative to something or someone. In relational quantum mechanics (RQM) it is relative to other quantum systems, in the…
In a recent note David Mermin attributed the idea that wave function collapse is a physical process to a misunderstanding of probability and the role it plays in quantum mechanics. There are, however, further misconceptions at play, some of…
The ontological aspect of Bohmian mechanics, as a hidden-variable theory that provides us with an objective description of a quantum world without observers, is widely known. Yet its practicality is getting more and more acceptance and…
This paper presents arguments purporting to show that von Neumann's description of the measurement process in quantum mechanics has a modern day version in the decoherence approach. We claim that this approach and the de Broglie-Bohm theory…
Our everyday experiences support the hypothesis that physical systems exist independently of the act of observation. Concordant theories are characterized by the objective realism assumption whereby the act of measurement simply reveals…
We derive the probabilities of measurement results from Schroedinger's equation plus a definition of macroscopic as a particular kind of thermodynamic limit. Bohr's insight that a measurement apparatus must be classical in nature and…
A non-relativistic quantum mechanical theory is proposed that describes the universe as a continuum of worlds whose mutual interference gives rise to quantum phenomena. A logical framework is introduced to properly deal with propositions…
The Copenhagen interpretation of quantum mechanics, which first took shape in Bohr's landmark 1928 paper on complementarity, remains an enigma. Although many physicists are skeptical about the necessity of Bohr's philosophical conclusions,…
The famous gedanken experiments of quantum mechanics have played crucial roles in developing the Copenhagen interpretation. They are studied here from the perspective of standard quantum mechanics, with no ontological interpretation…
The QBist view of science, first put forth to dispel the fog from quantum foundations, also clears up a longstanding puzzle in classical physics.
A different approach towards quantum theory is proposed in this paper. The basis is taken to be conceptual variables, physical variables that may be accessible or inaccessible, i.e., it may be possible or impossible to assign numerical…