Related papers: Indeterminism in Physics and Intuitionistic Mathem…
Dynamics, the study of change, is normally the subject of mechanics. Whether the chosen mechanics is ``fundamental'' and deterministic or ``phenomenological'' and stochastic, all changes are described relative to an external time. Here we…
Classical limits of quantum systems are shown to lead to different conceptions of spaces different from the classical one underlying the process of quantization of such systems. The accent is put in situations where traces of…
More than a speculative technology, quantum computing seems to challenge our most basic intuitions about how the physical world should behave. In this thesis I show that, while some intuitions from classical computer science must be…
Probability densities that are not uniquely determined by their moments are said to be "moment-indeterminate", or "M-indeterminate". Determining whether or not a density is M-indeterminate, or how to generate an M-indeterminate density, is…
A strongly deterministic theory of physics is one that permits exactly one possible history of the universe. In the words of Penrose (1989), ''it is not just a matter of the future being determined by the past; the entire history of the…
Quantum mechanics is usually presented starting from a series of postulates about the mathematical framework. In this work we show that those same postulates can be derived by assuming that measurements are discrete interactions: that is,…
According to quantum theory, randomness is a fundamental property of the universe yet classical physics is mostly deterministic. In this article I show that it is possible for deterministic systems to arise from random ones and discuss the…
I explain in what sense the structure of space and time is probably vague or indefinite, a notion I define. This leads to the mathematical representation of location in space and time by a vague interval. From this, a principle of…
Practicing mathematicians often assume that mathematical claims, when they are true, have good reasons to be true. Such a state of affairs is "unreasonable", in Wigner's sense, because basic results in computational complexity suggest that…
The conceptual setting of quantum mechanics is subject to an ongoing debate from its beginnings until now. The consequences of the apparent differences between quantum statistics and classical statistics range from the philosophical…
A major question in philosophy of science involves the unreasonable effectiveness of mathematics in physics. Why should mathematics, created or discovered, with nothing empirical in mind be so perfectly suited to describe the laws of the…
Although various limits on the predicability of physical phenomena as well as on physical knowables are commonly established and accepted, we challenge their ultimate validity. More precisely, we claim that fundamental limits arise only…
Many have wondered how mathematics, which appears to be the result of both human creativity and human discovery, can possibly exhibit the degree of success and seemingly-universal applicability to quantifying the physical world as…
Quantum theory expresses the observable relations between physical properties in terms of probabilities that depend on the specific context described by the "state" of a system. However, the laws of physics that emerge at the macroscopic…
A goal of physics is to understand the greatest possible breadth of natural phenomena in terms of the most economical set of basic concepts. However, as the understanding of physics has developed historically, its pedagogy and language have…
Einstein initially objected to the probabilistic aspect of quantum mechanics - the idea that God is playing at dice. Later he changed his ground, and focussed instead on the point that the Copenhagen Interpretation leads to what Einstein…
In this essay, I argue that mathematics is a natural science---just like physics, chemistry, or biology---and that this can explain the alleged "unreasonable" effectiveness of mathematics in the physical sciences. The main challenge for…
The aim of this work is to show how Einstein's quantum hypothesis leads immediately and necessarily to a departure from classical mechanics. First we note that the classical description and predictions are in terms of idealized measurements…
We present a panoramic view on various attempts to "solve" the problems of quantum measurement and macro-objectivation, i.e. of the transition from a probabilistic quantum mechanic microscopic world to a deterministic classical macroscopic…
The uncertainty relation is a distinctive characteristic of quantum theory. The uncertainty is essentially rooted in quantum states. In this work we regard the uncertainty as an intrinsic property of quantum state and characterize it…