Related papers: Reality facing quantum mechanics
A century after the advent of Quantum Mechanics and General Relativity, both theories enjoy incredible empirical success, constituting the cornerstones of modern physics. Yet, paradoxically, they suffer from deep-rooted, so-far intractable,…
There are several important philosophical problems to which quantum mechanics is often said to have made significant contributions: - Determinism: quantum theory has been taken to refute determinism; -Free Will: in turn, this is thought to…
Although quantum mechanics is one of our most successful physical theories, there has been a long-standing debate about the interpretation of the wave function---the central object of the theory. Two prominent views are that (i) it…
A modified version of relational quantum mechanics is developed based on the three following ideas. An observer can develop an internally consistent description of the universe but it will, of necessity, differ in particulars from the…
The aim of the article is to argue that the interpretations of quantum mechanics and of probability are much closer than usually thought. Indeed, a detailed analysis of the concept of probability (within the standard frequency theory of R.…
The hard problem in consciousness is the problem of understanding how physical processes in the brain could give rise to subjective conscious experience. In this paper, I suggest that in order to understand the relationship between…
After about a century since the first attempts by Bohr, the interpretation of quantum theory is still a field with many open questions. In this article a new interpretation of quantum theory is suggested, motivated by philosophical…
We perform an experimental test where we directly observe light-induced electron transitions with a macroscopic spatial discontinuity. The effect is related to the fundamental indivisibility of macroscopic orbit-like quantum states…
Quantum-mechanical interpretation-related implications of the theory of unitary premeasurement [1] on complete measurement (objectification or collapse included) are investigated in the present article with a view to give an affirmative…
The text points out that one of the main contradictions of quantum realism, which is particularly relevant to the social sciences, is the tension between the existence of an observer-independent reality and the idea that this reality is…
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 spectacular successes of quantum physics have made it a commonplace to assert that we live in a quantum world. This idea seems to imply a kind of "quantum fundamentalism" according to which everything in the universe (if not the…
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…
A new realist interpretation of quantum mechanics is introduced. Quantum systems are shown to have two kinds of properties: the usual ones described by values of quantum observables, which are called extrinsic, and those that can be…
In physics, there is the prevailing intuition that we are part of a unique external world, and that the goal of physics is to understand and describe this world. This assumption of the fundamentality of objective reality is often seen as a…
Scientific realism in classical (i.e. pre-quantum) physics has remained compatible with the naive realism of everyday thinking on the whole; whereas it has proven impossible to find any consistent way to visualize the world underlying…
An interpretation of non-relativistic quantum mechanics is presented in the spirit of Erwin Madelung's hydrodynamic formulation of QM and Louis de Broglie's and David Bohm's pilot wave models. The aims of the approach are as follows: 1) to…
The three major theoretical principles of quantum mechanics relevant to its interpretation are: (T1), linearity; (T2), invariance under certain groups; and (T3) the orthogonality and isolation of the different branches of the state vector.…
Positive and negative features of the Copenhagen interpretation are discussed. As positive features can be mentioned its pragmatism and its awareness of the crucial role of measurement. However, the main part of the contribution is devoted…
A source of much difficulty and confusion in the interpretation of quantum mechanics is a ``naive realism about operators.'' By this we refer to various ways of taking too seriously the notion of operator-as-observable, and in particular to…