Related papers: Are Physical Theories Incommensurable?
It is argued that Feynman's rules for evaluating probabilities, combined with von Neumann's principle of psycho-physical parallelism, help avoid inconsistencies, often associated with quantum theory. The former allows one to assign…
The concept of quantum particles derives from quantum field theory. Accepting that quantum mechanics is valid all the way implies that not only composite particles (such as protons and neutrons) would be derived from a field theory, but…
From an operational perspective, quantumness characterizes the exotic behavior in a physical process which cannot be explained with Newtonian physics. There are several widely used measures of quantumness, including coherence, discord, and…
The author's opinion on the interpretation of quantum mechanics is further elucidated. Not only may quantum mechanics be a description of the sub-microscopic world that is profoundly different from what is often asserted, particularly…
Barbour, Hawking, Misner and others have argued that time cannot play an essential role in the formulation of a quantum theory of cosmology. Here we present three challenges to their arguments, taken from works and remarks by Kauffman,…
While the relation between visualization and scientific understanding has been a topic of long-standing discussion, recent developments in physics have pushed the boundaries of this debate to new and still unexplored realms. For it is…
Generally a central role has been assigned to an unavoidable physical interaction between the measuring instrument and the physical entity measured in the change in the wave function that often occurs in measurement in quantum mechanics. A…
In 1929 Szilard pointed out that the physics of the observer may play a role in the analysis of experiments. The same year, Bohr pointed out that complementarity appears to arise naturally in psychology where both the objects of perception…
Biconformal spaces contain the essential elements of quantum mechanics, making the independent imposition of quantization unnecessary. Based on three postulates characterizing motion and measurement in biconformal geometry, we derive…
With basis on (i) the physical principle of local causality and (ii) a certain notion of elements of reality, Einstein, Podolsky, and Rosen (EPR) put forward an argument showing that physical instances may exist in which two non-commuting…
From the very beginning, Quantum Mechanics has been accompanied by crucial foundational questions: the possibility of visualizing physical processes, the limits of measurement epitomized by the Heisenberg uncertainty principle, the…
Quantum electrodynamics is the well-accepted theory. However, we feel it is useful to look at formalisms that provide alternative ways to describe light, because in the recent years the development of quantum field theories based primarily…
The concept of ``elements of reality" is analyzed within the framework of quantum theory. It is shown that elements of reality fail to fulfill the product rule. This is the core of recent proofs of the impossibility of a Lorentz-invariant…
This is a work of hard physical philosophy, where Quantum Perspectivism is shown to function as both an interpretation of quantum mechanics and a physical model for understanding Nietzsche's perspectivism. This framework combines quantum…
The measurement problem is seen as an ambiguity of quantum mechanics, or, beyond that, as a contradiction within the theory: Quantum mechanics offers two conflicting descriptions of the Wigner's-friend experiment. As we argue in this note…
In this dissertation the question of the unification of quantum theory and general relativity is treated. Based on the conceptual structure of these theories and under incorporation of certain ideas from classical philosophy there are…
Some of the problems connected with the interpretation of quantum mechanics are enumerated, in particular those related to some well known paradoxes and, above all, to the measurement process. We then show how the so called "Physics…
Three of the big puzzles of theoretical physics are the following: (i) There is apparently no time evolution in the dynamics of quantum general relativity, because the allowed quantum states must obey the Hamiltonian constraint. (ii) During…
Most physics theories are deterministic, with the notable exception of quantum mechanics which, however, comes plagued by the so-called measurement problem. This state of affairs might well be due to the inability of standard mathematics to…
After a summary of Bohr's views and their relation to Kant's theory of science, two fruitless lines of attack on the measurement problem are discussed: the way of the psi-ontologist and the way of the QBist. In the remainder of the paper…