Related papers: Wigner's Isolated Friend
Some of the problems connected with the interpretation of quantum mechanics are enumerated, in particular those related to some well known paradoxes and, above all, to the measurement process. We then show how the so called "Physics…
In this paper, we suggest an alternative interpretation for the quantum state vector, which, by considering temporal parts for physical objects, aims to give an intelligible account of measurement problem in quantum mechanics. We examine…
We critically evaluate the treatment of the notion of measurement in the Consistent Histories approach to quantum mechanics. We find such a treatment unsatisfactory because it relies, often implicitly, on elements external to those provided…
We study several examples from quantum control theory in the framework of Wigner functions and measures for infinite dimensional open quantum systems. An axiomatic definition of coherent quantum feedback is proposed within this setting.
Measurement uncertainty and experimental error are important concepts taught in undergraduate physics laboratories. Although student ideas about error and uncertainty in introductory classical mechanics lab experiments have been studied…
The conceptual problems in quantum mechanics -- related to the collapse of the wave function, the particle-wave duality, the meaning of measurement -- arise from the need to ascribe particle character to the wave function. As will be shown,…
The scientific method relies on facts, established through repeated measurements and agreed upon universally, independently of who observed them. In quantum mechanics, the objectivity of observations is not so clear, most dramatically…
Theory of quantum measurements is often classified as decision theory. An event in decision theory corresponds to the measurement of an observable. This analogy looks clear for operationally testable simple events. However, the situation is…
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…
Many of the conceptual problems students have in understanding quantum mechanics arise from the way probabilities are introduced in standard (textbook) quantum theory through the use of measurements. Introducing consistent microscopic…
The Bohr and von Neumann views on the measurement process in quantum mechanics have been interpreted for a long time in somewhat controversial terms, often leading to misconceptions. On the basis of some textual analysis, I would like to…
The problem of measurement is often considered as an inconsistency inside the quantum formalism. Many attempts to solve (or to dissolve) it have been made since the inception of quantum mechanics. The form of these attempts depends on the…
Inspired by the work of Wheeler among others, we have studied the problem of quantum measurements of space-time distances by applying the general principles of quantum mechanics as well as those of general relativity. Contrary to the…
Unsolved controversies about uncertainty relations and quantum measurements still persists nowadays. They originate around the shortcomings regarding the conventional interpretation of uncertainty relations. Here we show that the respective…
Until recently Jeffrey Bub and Itamar Pitowsky, in the framework of an information theoretic view of quantum mechanics, claimed first that to the measurement problem in its ordinary formulation there correspond in effect two measurement…
It is shown that any theory that has certain properties has a measurement problem, in the sense that it makes predictions that are incompatible with measurement outcomes being absolute (that is, unique and non-relational). These properties…
According to quantum theory, the outcomes of future measurements cannot (in general) be predicted with certainty. In some cases, even with a complete physical description of the system to be measured and the measurement apparatus, the…
Measurement in quantum mechanics is generally described as an irreversible process that perturbs the wavefunction describing a quantum system. In this work we establish a formal connection between the measurement description within the…
The negativity of a given state's Wigner function has been proposed as a measure of quantumness of that state in a unipartite system. This otherwise physically intuitive and useful phase-space measure however does not yield the right…
Gao (2017) presents a new mentalistic reformulation of the well-known measurement problem affecting the standard formulation of quantum mechanics. According to this author, it is essentially a determinate-experience problem, namely a…