Related papers: Everett's Multiverse and the World as Wavefunction
Everett's Relative State Interpretation has gained increasing interest due to the progress of understanding the role of decoherence. In order to fulfill its promise as a realistic description of the physical world, two postulates are…
Wavefunction collapse is usually seen as a discontinuous violation of the unitary evolution of a quantum system, caused by the observation. Moreover, the collapse appears to be nonlocal in a sense which seems at odds with General…
The interpretation of quantum mechanics is an area of increasing interest to many working physicists. In particular, interest has come from those involved in quantum computing and information theory, as there has always been a strong…
I make the case that the Universe according to unitary (no-collapse) quantum theory has a branching structure, and so can literally be regarded as a "many-worlds" theory. These worlds are not part of the fundamental ontology of quantum…
In Everettian quantum mechanics, justifications for the Born rule appeal to self-locating uncertainty or decision theory. Such justifications have focused exclusively on a pure-state Everettian multiverse, represented by a wave function.…
An unresolved question in inflationary cosmology is the assignment of probabilities to different types of events that can occur in the eternally inflating multiverse. We explore the possibility that the resolution of this "measure problem"…
Beginning with the Everett-DeWitt many-worlds interpretation of quantum mechanics, there have been a series of proposals for how the state vector of a quantum system might split at any instant into orthogonal branches, each of which…
The notion of wavelets is defined. It is briefly described {\it what} are wavelets, {\it how} to use them, {\it when} we do need them, {\it why} they are preferred and {\it where} they have been applied. Then one proceeds to the…
One attractive interpretation of quantum mechanics is the ensemble interpretation, where Quantum Mechanics merely describes a statistical ensemble of objects and not individual objects. But this interpretation does not address why the…
Recently there have emerged an assortment of theorems relating to the 'absoluteness of emerged events,' and these results have sometimes been used to argue that quantum mechanics may involve some kind of metaphysically radical…
Recently, there has been a discussion on the origin of the quantum probability rules (Deutsch quant-ph/9906015, Polley quant-ph/9906124, Barnum et al. quant-ph/9907024, Finkelstein quant-ph/9907004). This contribution, which is a slightly…
The many-worlds interpretation (MWI) of quantum mechanics poses a simple question. What would reality look like if everything evolved in time according to the same quantum equations? There is an attractive consistency to treating…
Probabilities of the outcomes of consecutive quantum measurements can be obtained by construction probability amplitudes, thus implying unitary evolution of the measured system, broken each time a measurement is made. In practice, the…
I propose a new class of interpretations, {\it real world interpretations}, of the quantum theory of closed systems. These interpretations postulate a preferred factorization of Hilbert space and preferred projective measurements on one…
The meaning of the wave function of the Universe was actively discussed in 1980s. In most works on quantum cosmology it is accepted that the wave function is a probability amplitude for the Universe to have some space geometry, or to be…
In resisting attempts to explain the unity of a whole in terms of a multiplicity of interacting parts, quantum mechanics calls for an explanatory concept that proceeds in the opposite direction: from unity to multiplicity. It concerns the…
The idea of a multiverse -- an ensemble of universes -- has received increasing attention in cosmology, both as the outcome of the originating process that generated our own universe, and as an explanation for why our universe appears to be…
Some recent works have introduced a quantum twist to the concept of complementarity, exemplified by a setup in which the which-way detector is in a superposition of being present and absent. It has been argued that such experiments allow…
Effects associated in quantum mechanics with a divisible probability wave are explained as physically real consequences of the equal but opposite reaction of the apparatus as a particle is measured. Taking as illustration a Mach-Zehnder…
We propose partial measurements as a conceptual tool to understand how to operate with counterfactual claims in quantum physics. Indeed, unlike standard von Neumann measurements, partial measurements can be reversed probabilistically. We…