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Quantum uncertainty is described here in two guises: indeterminacy with its concomitant indeterminism of measurement outcomes, and fuzziness, or unsharpness. Both features were long seen as obstructions of experimental possibilities that…

Quantum Physics · Physics 2011-01-04 Paul Busch

If quantum mechanics is taken for granted the randomness derived from it may be vacuous or even delusional, yet sufficient for many practical purposes. "Random" quantum events are intimately related to the emergence of both space-time as…

Quantum Physics · Physics 2021-04-27 Karl Svozil

We still lack any consensus about what one is actually talking about as one uses quantum mechanics. There is a gap between the abstract terms in which the theory is couched and the phenomena the theory enables each of us to account for so…

Quantum Physics · Physics 2020-04-17 N. David Mermin

The violation of Bell inequalities seems to establish an important fact about the world: that it is non-local. However, this result relies on the assumption of the statistical independence of the measurement settings with respect to…

History and Philosophy of Physics · Physics 2020-09-30 Augustin Baas , Baptiste Le Bihan

I introduce a framework to distinguish two domains of physics - the manifest (i.e. the directly observable empirical records in terms of manifest configurations) and the non-manifest domain of physics (i.e. the things that the manifest…

Quantum Physics · Physics 2024-08-13 Johannes Fankhauser

The study of undecidability in problems arising from physics has experienced a renewed interest, mainly in connection with quantum information problems. The goal of this review is to survey this recent development. After a historical…

Mathematical Physics · Physics 2025-07-17 Álvaro Perales-Eceiza , Toby Cubitt , Mile Gu , David Pérez-García , Michael M. Wolf

It is often claimed that the fundamental laws of physics are deterministic and time-symmetric and that therefore our experience of the passage of time is an illusion. This paper will critically discuss these claims and show that they are…

Quantum Physics · Physics 2023-04-20 Barbara Drossel

Measurement outcomes provide data for a physical theory. Unless they are objective they support no objective scientific knowledge. So the outcome of a quantum measurement must be an objective physical fact. But recent arguments purport to…

Quantum Physics · Physics 2021-08-06 Richard Healey

Quantum mechanics (QM) has attracted a considerable amount of mysticism, in public opinion and even among academic researches, due to some of its conceptually puzzling features, such as the modification of reality by the observer and…

History and Philosophy of Physics · Physics 2011-12-01 Giorgio Torrieri

Mathematics and its relation to the physical universe have been the topic of speculation since the days of Pythagoras. Several different views of the nature of mathematics have been considered: Realism - mathematics exists and is…

History and Philosophy of Physics · Physics 2012-12-27 Alex Harvey

In a recent paper [1], it has been claimed that the outcomes of a quantum coin toss which is idealized as an infinite binary sequence is 1-random. We also defend the correctness of this claim and assert that the outcomes of quantum…

General Physics · Physics 2021-06-16 İnanç Şahin

Science is a crowning glory of the human spirit and its applications remain our best hope for social progress. But there are limitations to current science and perhaps to any science. The general mind-body problem is known to be intractable…

Neurons and Cognition · Quantitative Biology 2022-03-29 Jerome Feldman

Why does such a successful theory like Quantum Mechanics have so many mysteries? The history of this theory is replete with dubious interpretations and controversies, and yet a knowledge of its predictions, however, contributed to the…

In this paper, we reject commonly accepted views on fundamentality in science, either based on bottom-up construction or top-down reduction to isolate the alleged fundamental entities. We do not introduce any new scientific methodology, but…

History and Philosophy of Physics · Physics 2020-10-20 Flavio Del Santo , Chiara Cardelli

Existing physical theories do not predict every feature of our experience but only certain regularities of that experience. That difference between what could be observed and what can be predicted is one kind of limit on scientific…

General Relativity and Quantum Cosmology · Physics 2007-05-23 James B. Hartle

Construal of observable facts or events, that is, the manner in which we understand reality, is based not only on mathematical formulas of a theory suggested as a reasonable explanation for physical phenomena (like general relativity or…

Quantum Physics · Physics 2021-07-19 Arkady Bolotin

Standard quantum mechanics undeniably violates the notion of separability that classical physics accustomed us to consider as valid. By relating the phenomenon of quantum nonseparability to the all-important concept of potentiality, we…

Quantum Physics · Physics 2008-11-25 Vassilios Karakostas

Quantum mechanics, one of the most successful theories in the history of science, was created to account for physical systems not describable by classical physics. Though it is consistent with all experiments conducted thus far, many of its…

Quantum Physics · Physics 2016-02-17 Gary Oas , J. Acacio de Barros

Quantum "states" are objective probability measures. Because their dependence on a time is not the time dependence of an evolving state, they are neither states of Nature nor "states of knowledge." There is no such thing as an evolving…

Quantum Physics · Physics 2007-05-23 Ulrich Mohrhoff

Constructor theory seeks to express all fundamental scientific theories in terms of a dichotomy between possible and impossible physical transformations - those that can be caused to happen and those that cannot. This is a departure from…

History and Philosophy of Physics · Physics 2013-01-18 David Deutsch