Related papers: Is the Past Determined?
The wave-particle duality dates back to Einstein's explanation of the photoelectric effect through quanta of light and de Broglie's hypothesis of matter waves. Quantum mechanics uses an abstract description for the behavior of physical…
Physicists are increasingly beginning to take seriously the possibility of laws outside the traditional time-evolution paradigm; yet our understanding of determinism is still predicated on a forwards time-evolution picture, making it…
In a recent article under the above title (but without the question mark) Henry Stapp presented arguments which lead him to conclude that under suitable conditions ``the truth of a statement that refers only to phenomena confined to an…
Recent experiments (gedanken or otherwise) and theorems in quantum mechanics (QM), such as new iterations on Wigner's friend and delayed choice, have led many people to claim that QM is not compatible with determinate and intersubjectively…
The conventional explanation of delayed-choice experiments appears to violate our causal intuition at the quantum level. I reanalyze these experiments using time-reversed and time-symmetric formulations of quantum mechanics. The…
Hidden-variable models aim to reproduce the results of quantum theory and to satisfy our classical intuition. Their refutation is usually based on deriving predictions that are different from those of quantum mechanics. Here instead we…
Wheeler's delayed-choice experiment investigates the indeterminacy of wave-particle duality and the role played by the measurement apparatus in quantum theory. Due to the inconsistency with classical physics, it has been generally believed…
A real two-particle experiment is proposed in which one of the particles undergoes two successive impacts on beam-splitters. It is shown that the standard quantum mechanical superposition principle implies the possibility of influences…
The title refers to the Free Will Theorem by Conway and Kochen whose flashy formulation is: if experimenters possess free will, then so do particles. In more modest terms, the theorem says that individual pairs of spacelike separated…
Causal quantum theory assumes that measurements or collapses are well-defined physical processes, localised in space-time, and never give perfectly reliable outcomes and that the outcome of one measurement only influences the outcomes of…
In this article, we present a detailed analysis of two famous delayed choice experiments: Wheeler's classic gedanken-experiment and the delayed quantum eraser. Our analysis shows that the outcomes of both experiments can be fully explained…
Weak measurements offer new insights into the behavior of quantum systems. Combined with post-selection, quantum mechanics predicts a range of new experimentally testable phenomena. In this paper I consider weak measurements performed on…
Environment induced decoherence, and other quantum processes, have been proposed in the literature to explain the apparent spontaneous selection - out of the many mathematically eligible bases - of a privileged measurement basis that…
Wave-particle duality has become one of the flagships of quantum mechanics. This counter-intuitive concept is highlighted in a delayed choice experiment, where the experimental setup that reveals either the particle or wave nature of a…
Recent studies suggest that cooperative decision-making in one-shot interactions is a history-dependent dynamic process: promoting intuition versus deliberation has typically a positive effect on cooperation (dynamism) among people living…
A time machine that sends information back to the past may, in principle, be built using closed time-like curves. However, the realization of a time machine must be congruent with apparent paradoxes that arise from traveling back in time.…
Modeling a temporal process as if it is Markovian assumes the present encodes all of the process's history. When this occurs, the present captures all of the dependency between past and future. We recently showed that if one randomly…
Determinism is established in quantum mechanics by tracing the probabilities in the Born rules back to the absolute (overall) phase constants of the wave functions and recognizing these phase constants as pseudorandom numbers. The reduction…
The question: "Where was a quantum particle between pre- and postselection measurements?" is analyzed in view of a recent proposal that it was in the overlap of the forward and backward evolving wave functions. It is argued that this…
Following earlier applications of weak measurement to new cases (Part I), we proceed to explore its temporal peculiarities. We analyze an idealized experiment in which weak which-path measurements do not prevent consecutive weak…