Related papers: The metaphysics of decoherence
Cosmology might turn out to be the study of fluctuations around a "de Sitter equilibrium" state. In this article I review the basic ideas and the attractive features of this framework, and respond to a number common questions raised about…
The theories of pre-quantum physics are standardly seen as representing physical systems and their properties. Quantum mechanics in its standard form is a more problematic case: here, interpretational problems have led to doubts about the…
To discuss the quantum to classical transition in quantum cosmology, we study the decoherence factor and the peak of the Wigner function, which respectively represent the degree of decoherence and the degree to which the classical motion of…
One cannot justifiably presuppose the physical salience of structures derived via decoherence theory based upon an entirely uninterpreted use of the quantum formalism. Non-probabilistic accounts of the emergence of probability via…
Real world quantum systems are open to perpetual influence from the wider environment. Quantum gravitational fluctuations provide a most fundamental source of the environmental influence through their universal interactions with all forms…
Despite being created through a fundamentally quantum-mechanical process, cosmological structures have not yet revealed any sign of genuine quantum correlations. Among the obstructions to the direct detection of quantum signatures in…
A long-standing tradition, largely present in both the physical and the philosophical literature, regards the advent of (special) relativity -- with its block-universe picture -- as the failure of any indeterministic program in physics. On…
A recent analysis by Pikovski et al. [Nat. Phys. 11, 668 (2015)] has triggered interest in the question of how to include relativistic corrections in the quantum dynamics governing many-particle systems in a gravitational field. Here we…
Traditionally, to be a realist about something means believing in the independent existence of that something. In this line of thought, a scientific realist is someone who believes in the objective existence of the entities postulated by…
Quantum decoherence, which appears when a system interacts with its environment in an irreversible way, plays a fundamental role in the description of quantum-to-classical transitions and has been successfully applied in some important…
Cosmological models that invoke a multiverse - a collection of unobservable regions of space where conditions are very different from the region around us - are controversial, on the grounds that unobservable phenomena shouldn't play a…
We review a number of issues in foundations of quantum theory and quantum cosmology including, in particular, the problem of the preferred basis in the many-worlds interpretation of quantum mechanics, the relation between this…
The fact that the Environment Induced Decoherence approach offers no general criterion to decide where to place the "cut" between system and environment has been considered as a serious conceptual problem of the proposal. In this letter we…
We investigate the sensitivity of quantum systems that are chaotic in a classical limit, to small perturbations of their equations of motion. This sensitivity, originally studied in the context of defining quantum chaos, is relevant to…
In this contribution I give a brief introduction to the essential concepts and mechanisms of decoherence by the environment. The emphasis will be not so much on technical details but rather on conceptual issues and the impact on the…
Using cosmological perturbation theory we show that the most relevant defor- mation of gravity is consistent at the linear level. In particular, we prove the absence of uni- tarity violating negative norm states in the weak coupling regime…
The hypothesis of a discrete fabric of the universe--the "Planck scale"--is always on stage, since it solves mathematical and conceptual problems in the infinitely small. However, it clashes with special relativity, which is designed for…
A popular model of decoherence based on the linear coupling to harmonic oscillator heat baths is analized and shown to be inappropriate in the regime where decoherence dominates over energy dissipation, called pure decoherence regime. The…
The fact that we rarely directly observe much quantum uncertainty is often attributed to decoherence. However, decoherence does not reduce the quantum uncertainty in the full quantum state. Whether or not it reduces the quantum…
Universe structure emerges in the unreduced, complex-dynamic interaction process with the simplest initial configuration (two attracting homogeneous fields, quant-ph/9902015). The unreduced interaction analysis gives intrinsically creative…