Related papers: Indeterminism in Physics and Intuitionistic Mathem…
The claim of the freedom of the will (understood as an individual who is transcendent to Nature) in the name of XXth century scientific knowledge, against the perspective of XVIIIth-XIXth century scientific materialism, is analysed and…
We discuss that there is a crucial contradiction within quantum mechanics. We derive a proposition concerning a quantum expectation value under the assumption of the existence of the directions in a spin-1/2 system. The quantum predictions…
We provide a decision-theoretic framework for dealing with uncertainty in quantum mechanics. This uncertainty is two-fold: on the one hand there may be uncertainty about the state the quantum system is in, and on the other hand, as is…
Mathematics is a critical part of much scientific research. Physics in particular weaves math extensively into its instruction beginning in high school. Despite much research on the learning of both physics and math, the problem of how to…
Information is everywhere in nature which is very uncertain and unpredictable. But information, in itself, is a very ambiguous term. In this cursory write-up, we attempt to understand the formal meaning of information by quantifying…
In this work, we show that very natural, apparently simple problems in quantum measurement theory can be undecidable even if their classical analogues are decidable. Undecidability hence appears as a genuine quantum property here. Formally,…
Quantum theory (QT) has been confirmed by numerous experiments, yet we still cannot fully grasp the meaning of the theory. As a consequence, the quantum world appears to us paradoxical. Here we shed new light on QT by being based on two…
Quantum mechanics predicts many surprising phenomena, including the two-slit interference of electrons. It has often been claimed that these phenomena cannot be understood in classical terms. But the meaning of "classical" is often not…
Along with weaving together observations, experiments, and theoretical constructs into a coherent mesh of understanding of the world around us, physics over its past five centuries has continuously refined the base concepts on which the…
The ideas of aleatoric and epistemic uncertainty are widely used to reason about the probabilistic predictions of machine-learning models. We identify incoherence in existing discussions of these ideas and suggest this stems from the…
Spacetime singularities in general relativity are commonly thought to be problematic, in that they signal a breakdown in the theory. We address the question of how to interpret this breakdown, restricting our attention to classical…
Familiar formulations of classical and quantum mechanics are shown to follow from a general theory of mechanics based on pure states with an intrinsic probability structure. This theory is developed to the stage where theorems from quantum…
Quantum theory makes the most accurate empirical predictions and yet it lacks simple, comprehensible physical principles from which the theory can be uniquely derived. A broad class of probabilistic theories exist which all share some…
The epistemological interpretation of quantum mechanics is still in an unacceptable status. This becomes obvious if looking on the variety of interpretations currently under discussion. However, the physical community together with…
Some possible (re)sources of indeterminism and randomness encountered in physics are enumerated. These gaps in the physical laws, if they exist, could possibly be exploited for dualistic interfaces. We also speculate that physical laws and…
Every physical measuring needs a finite, different from zero measurement time and provides information in form of the choice of a measurement result from all possible measurement results. If infinitely many (different) measurement results…
A physical system is determined by a finite set of initial conditions and "laws" represented by equations. The system is computable if we can solve the equations in all instances using a "finite body of mathematical knowledge". In this…
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…
An account of determinism and indeterminism in physics, addressed to non-physicist readers, leading up to proposals for how to understand statements about the future and single-event probability, motivated by quantum mechanics.
A characteristical property of a classical physical theory is that the observables are real functions taking an exact outcome on every (pure) state; in a quantum theory, at the contrary, a given observable on a given state can take several…