Related papers: Defending Quantum Objectivity
The Wigner's friend thought experiment was intended to illustrate the difficulty one has in describing an agent as a quantum system when that agent performs a measurement. While it does pose a challenge to the orthodox interpretation of…
The paper proves that quantum mechanics is compatible with the constructive realism of modern philosophy of science. The proof is based on the observation that properties of quantum systems that are uniquely determined by their preparations…
During many years since the birth of quantum mechanics, instrumentalist interpretations prevailed: the meaning of the theory was expressed in terms of measurements results. But in the last decades, several attempts to interpret it from a…
The use of weak measurements for performing quantum tomography is enjoying increased attention due to several recent proposals. The advertised merits of using weak measurements in this context are varied, but are generally represented by…
To-date, the most elaborated attempt to complete quantum mechanics by the addition of hidden variables is the de Broglie-Bohm (pilot wave) theory (dBBT). It endows particles with definite positions at all times. Their evolution is governed…
In the conventional formulation, it is broadly accepted that simultaneous measurability and commutativity of observables are equivalent. However, several objections have been claimed that there are cases in which even nowhere commuting…
In this contribution I review rigorous formulations of a variety of limitations of measurability in quantum mechanics. To this end I begin with a brief presentation of the conceptual tools of modern measurement theory. I will make precise…
We show that, contrarily to the widespread belief, in quantum mechanics repeatable measurements are not necessarily described by orthogonal projectors--the customary paradigm of "observable". Nonorthogonal repeatability, however, occurs…
We review realistic models that reproduce quantum theory in some limit and yield potentially new physics outside that limit. In particular, we consider deterministic hidden-variables theories (such as the pilot-wave model) and their…
For theoretical approach of quantum measurements it is proposed a set of reconsidered conjectures. The proposed approach implies linear functional transformations for probability density and current but preserves the expressions for…
An attempt is made to give a heuristic explanation of the distinguished role of measurement in the quantum theory. We question the notion of "naive" reductionism by stressing the difference between an isolated quantum and classical object.…
According to Bell's theorem, local realism is incompatible with quantum theory. However, it depends on an implied assumption about quantum measurement. We suggest that the assumption might be removed by a detailed quantum analysis of the…
Wigner had expressed the opinion that the impossibility of exact measurements of single operators like position operators rendered the notion of geometrical points somewhat dubious in physics. Using Sewell's recent resolution of the…
The existence of incompatible measurements is often believed to be a feature of quantum theory which signals its inconsistency with any classical worldview. To prove the failure of classicality in the sense of Kochen-Specker…
One of the most difficult problems in quantum mechanics is the analysis of the measurement processes. In this paper, we point out that many of these difficulties originate from the different roles of measurement outcomes and observable…
Quantum Darwinism offers an explanation for the emergence of classical objective features -- those we are used to at macroscopic scales -- from quantum properties at the microscopic level. The interaction of a quantum system with its…
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…
In the QBist approach to quantum mechanics, a measurement is an action an agent takes on the world external to herself. A measurement device is an extension of the agent and both measurement outcomes and their probabilities are personal to…
Recently a study of the first superposed mechanical quantum object ("machine") visible to the naked eye was published. However, as we show, it turns out that if the object would actually be observed, i.e. would interact with an optical…
Since its inception, quantum theory has been the subject of fierce interpretive controversy, which persists to this day. Disputed topics include the basic ontology and dynamics of the theory, the role (if any) of measurement, the meaning of…