Related papers: Free Will and Quantum Mechanics: Much Ado about No…
David Finkelstein was very fond of the new information-theoretic paradigm of physics advocated by John Archibald Wheeler and Richard Feynman. Only recently, however, the paradigm has concretely shown its full power, with the derivation of…
Quantum Mechanics (QM) is one of the pillars of modern physics: an impressive amount of experiments have confirmed this theory and many technological applications are based on it. Nevertheless, at one century since its development, various…
Quantum mechanics is a theory that is as effective as it is counterintuitive. While quantum practices operate impeccably, they compel us to embrace enigmatic phenomena like the collapse of the state vector and non-locality, thereby pushing…
It was argued [1] that there can be no extension of quantum mechanics with improved predictive power on a measurement freely chosen, independently of any event that is not in its future light cone. The assumption of measurement choice was…
The hidden-variables premise is shown to be equivalent to the existence of generic filters for algebras of commuting propositions and for certain more general propositional systems. The significance of this equivalence is interpreted in…
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…
After the development of a self-consistent quantum formalism nearly a century ago, there ensued a quest to understand the often counterintuitive predictions of the theory. These endeavors invariably begin with the assumption of the "truth"…
The ontological aspect of Bohmian mechanics, as a hidden-variable theory that provides us with an objective description of a quantum world without observers, is widely known. Yet its practicality is getting more and more acceptance and…
A succinct statement and justification of all the principles necessary to understand and evaluate interpretations of quantum mechanics is given. These principles provide strong constraints on interpretations. They imply the particle-like…
The detailed study of a quantum free particle on a pointed plane is performed. It is shown that there is no problem with a mysterious ``quantum anticentrifugal force" acting on a free particle on a plane discussed in a very recent paper: M.…
Feynman famously asserted that interference is the only real mystery in quantum mechanics (QM). It is concluded that the reason for this mystery, and thereby the related mysteries of complementarity, non-commutativity of observables, the…
We formulate physically-motivated axioms for a physical theory which for systems with a finite number of degrees of freedom uniquely lead to Quantum Mechanics as the only nontrivial consistent theory. Complex numbers and the existence of…
The quantum version of the free fall problem is a topic often skipped in undergraduate quantum mechanics courses because its discussion usually requires wavepackets built on the Airy functions -- a difficult computation. Here, on the…
Quantum mechanics has irked physicists ever since its conception more than 100 years ago. While some of the misgivings, such as it being unintuitive, are merely aesthetic, quantum mechanics has one serious shortcoming: it lacks a physical…
This paper is concerned with the nature of probability in physics, and in quantum mechanics in particular. It starts with a brief discussion of the evolution of Itamar Pitowsky's thinking about probability in quantum theory from 1994 to…
We raise the issue whether conventional quantum mechanics, which is not a hidden variable theory in the usual Jauch-Piron's sense, might nevertheless be a hidden variable theory in the sense recently conjectured by G. 't Hooft in his…
In the classical theory of electromagnetism, the permittivity and the permeability of free space are constants whose magnitudes do not seem to possess any deeper physical meaning. By replacing the free space of classical physics with the…
Quantum Mechanics, the physical theory describing the microworld, represents one of science's greatest triumphs. It lies at the root of all modern digital technologies and offers unparalleled correspondence between prediction and…
It is shown how to map the quantum states of a system of free scalar particles one-to-one onto the states of a completely deterministic model. It is a classical field theory with a large (global) gauge group. The mapping is now also applied…
We study the concept of free will by defining a mathematical model that extends Newton's laws of motion, in such a way that bodies are replaced with agents endowed with free will. In our model the free will of agents is not entirely free,…