Related papers: Theoretical Physics and Indian Philosophy: Concept…
Relationships between current theories, and relationships between current theories and the sought theory of quantum gravity (QG), play an essential role in motivating the need for QG, aiding the search for QG, and defining what would count…
Most educational literature on conceptual change concerns the process by which introductory students acquire scientific knowledge. However, with modern developments in science and technology, the social significance of learning successive…
The mathematical formalism of quantum theory exhibits significant effectiveness when applied to cognitive phenomena that have resisted traditional (set theoretical) modeling. Relying on a decade of research on the operational foundations of…
Research in student knowledge and learning of science has typically focused on explaining conceptual change. Recent research, however, documents the great degree to which student thinking is dynamic and context-sensitive, implicitly calling…
Quantum mechanics and classical mechanics are two very different theories, but the correspondence principle states that quantum particles behave classically in the limit of high quantum number. In recent years much research has been done on…
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…
Physical superpositions exist both in classical and in quantum physics. However, what is exactly meant by 'superposition' in each case is extremely different. In this paper we discuss some of the multiple interpretations which exist in the…
Conceptual consequences of recent results in loop quantum gravity are collected and discussed here in view of their implications for a modern philosophy of science which is mainly understood as one that totalizes scientific insight so as to…
Coherence and correlations represent two related properties of a compound system. The system can be, for instance, the polarization of a photon, which forms part of a polarization-entangled two-photon state, or the spatial shape of a…
In this article, we employ mathematical concepts as a tool to examine the phenomenon of consciousness experience and logical phenomena. Through our investigation, we aim to demonstrate that our experiences, while not confined to…
The decoherence mechanism signals the limits beyond which the system dynamics approaches the classical behavior. We show that in some cases decoherence may also signal the limits beyond which the system dynamics has to be described by…
The correspondence principle bridges the quantum and classical worlds by establishing a direct link between their dynamics. This well-accepted tenant of quantum physics has been explored in quantum systems wherein the number of particles is…
We develop a new interpretation of quantum theory by combining insights from extended Wigner's friend scenarios and quantum causal modelling. In this interpretation, which synthesizes ideas from relational quantum mechanics and consistent…
We review canonical experiments on systems that have pushed the boundary between the quantum and classical worlds towards much larger scales, and discuss their unique features that enable quantum coherence to survive. Because the types of…
A sketch of three senses of emergence and a suggestive view on the emergence of time and the direction of time is presented. After trying to identify which issues philosophers interested in emergent phenomena in physics view as important I…
Mesoscopic physics deals with three fundamental issues: quantum coherence, fluctuations and correlations. Here we analyze these issues for atom optics, using a simplified model of an assembly of atoms (or detectors, which are particles with…
Many physicists, following Einstein, believe that the ultimate aim of theoretical physics is to find a unified theory of all interactions which would not depend on any free dimensionless constant, i.e., a dimensionless constant that is only…
We discuss the problems of consensus and unity in science. The natural sciences seem to contrast with many other areas of endeavor in that a high level of consensus seems to exist in them. However, a careful analysis of the structure of…
Here we analyze the relationship between quantum contextuality and decoherence in interference experiments with matter particles by means of a simple reduced quantum-trajectory model, which attempts to simulate the behavior of the…
The main aim of this paper is to make a remark about the relation between (i) dualities between theories, as `duality' is understood in physics and (ii) equivalence of theories, as `equivalence' is understood in logic and philosophy. The…