Related papers: The relational ontology of contemporary physics
I suggest that the common unease with taking quantum mechanics as a fundamental description of nature (the "measurement problem") could derive from the use of an incorrect notion, as the unease with the Lorentz transformations before…
This paper elaborates on relationalism about space and time as motivated by a minimalist ontology of the physical world: there are only matter points that are individuated by the distance relations among them, with these relations changing.…
The theory of probability and the quantum theory, the one mathematical and the other physical, are related in that each admits a number of very different interpretations. It has been proposed that the conceptual problems of the quantum…
I argue that quantum mechanics is fundamentally a theory about the representation and manipulation of information, not a theory about the mechanics of nonclassical waves or particles. The notion of quantum information is to be understood as…
How can quantum mechanics be (i) the fundamental theoretical framework of contemporary physics and (ii) a probability calculus that presupposes the events to which, and on the basis of which, it assigns probabilities? The question is…
The quantum gravity is formulated based on principle of local gauge invariance. The model discussed in this paper has local gravitational gauge symmetry and gravitational field is represented by gauge field. In leading order approximation,…
In this article we present a possible way to make usual quantum mechanics fully compatible with physical realism, defined as the statement that the goal of physics is to study entities of the natural world, existing independently from any…
There is a serious disconnect between quantum theory and gravity. It occurs at the level of the very foundations of quantum theory, and is far deeper than just the matter of trying to quantize a non-linear theory. We shall examine some of…
Through a new interpretation of Special Theory of Relativity and with a model given for physical space, we can find a way to understand the basic principles of Quantum Mechanics consistently from Classical Theory. It is supposed that…
The purpose of this paper is to sketch an approach towards a reconciliation of quantum theory with relativity theory. It will actually be argued that these two theories ultimately rely on one another. A general operator-algebraic framework…
Non-relativistic quantum mechanics is shown to emerge from classical mechanics through the requirement of a relativity principle based on special transformations acting on position and momentum uncertainties. These transformations keep the…
Quantum Relativity is supposed to be a new theory, which locally is a deformation of Special Relativity, and globally it is a background independent theory including the main ideas of General Relativity, with hindsight from Quantum Theory.…
We introduce relationalism and discuss how it is useful for interpreting probability theory and quantum mechanics. This paper is written in relatively lay terms and presumes no prior knowledge of quantum theory.
`How do our ideas about quantum mechanics affect our understanding of spacetime?' This familiar question leads to quantum gravity. The complementary question is also important: `How do our ideas about spacetime affect our understanding of…
Quantum mechanics is a special kind of description of motion. The concept of wave function itself implies the openness of quantum system. We show that quantum mechanics describes the quantum correlation, i.e., entanglement, and information…
In a purely relational theory there exists a tension between the relational character of the theory and the existence of quantities like distance and duration. We review this issue in the context of the Leibniz-Clarke correspondence. We…
It is demonstrated that the reason for the diversity of interpretations of quantum mechanics is that they are not connected by continuity relations with classical physics, and also the reason is the impossibility of operationalist…
The apparent impossibility of extending non-relativistic quantum mechanics to a relativistic quantum theory is shown to be due to the insufficient structural richness of the field of complex numbers over which quantum mechanics is built. A…
Philosophers of science commonly connect ontology and science, stating that these disciplines maintain a two-way relationship: on the one hand, we can extract ontology from scientific theories; on the other hand, ontology provides the…
This is a translation into English of my Masters thesis (hovedoppgave) from 1991. The main topic of the thesis is the relation between fundamental physics and philosophy, and a discussion of several possible ontologies of quantum field…