Related papers: Are Physical Theories Incommensurable?
The major advances in physics have been through counterintuitive breakthroughs-- ideas that seemed to go against prevailing convictions. In the twentieth century the Special and General Theory of Relativity and Quantum Mechanics have…
In this work, we show that very natural, apparently simple problems in quantum measurement theory can be undecidable even if their classical analogues are decidable. Undecidability hence appears as a genuine quantum property here. Formally,…
The problem of understanding quantum mechanics is in large measure the problem of finding appropriate ways of thinking about the spatial and temporal aspects of the physical world. The standard, substantival, set-theoretic conception of…
Einstein's article on the EPR paradox is the most cited of his works, but not many know that it was not fully representative of the way he thought about the incompleteness of the quantum formalism. Indeed, his main worry was not…
Consideration of the von Neumann measurement process underlying interference experiments shows that the uncertainty in the incoming wave, responsible for its interference, translates during measurement into an uncertainty at the measuring…
This is the written version of a talk I gave at the 35th Symposium Ahrenshoop in Berlin, Germany, August 2002. It is an exposition of joint work with S. Doplicher, K. Fredenhagen, and Gh. Piacitelli [1]. The violation of unitarity found in…
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…
Inspired by the work of Feynman, Deutsch, We formally propose the theory of physical computability and accordingly, the physical complexity theory. To achieve this, a framework that can evaluate almost all forms of computation using various…
Is the universe computable? If yes, is it computationally a polynomial place? In standard quantum mechanics, which permits infinite parallelism and the infinitely precise specification of states, a negative answer to both questions is not…
The interpretation of quantum mechanics has been a problem since its founding days. A large contribution to the discussion of possible interpretations of quantum mechanics is given by the so-called impossibility proofs for hidden variable…
In a recently proposed interpretation of quantum mechanics, U. Mohrhoff advocates original and thought-provoking views on space and time, the definition of macroscopic objects, and the meaning of probability statements. The interpretation…
Orthodox Copenhagen quantum theory renounces the quest to understand the reality in which we are imbedded, and settles for practical rules that describe connections between our observations. Many physicist have believed that this…
Here we continue with the ideas expressed in "On the strangeness of quantum mechanics" aiming to demonstrate more concretely how this philosophical outlook might be used as a key for resolving the measurement problem. We will address in…
Quantum theory (QT) has been confirmed by numerous experiments, yet we still cannot fully grasp the meaning of the theory. As a consequence, the quantum world appears to us paradoxical. Here we shed new light on QT by having it follow from…
However, the observations encompassed by classical physics excludes the observer from the physical reality, yet the deep-down understandung of nature --{\it the quantum theory}-- can not avoid the intrusion of observer into the measurement…
First, this paper broaches the definition of science and the epistemic yield of tenets and approaches: phenomenological (descriptive only), well-founded (solid first principles, conducive to deep understanding), provisional (falsifiable if…
"Physical theories of fundamental significance tend to be gauge theories. These are theories in which the physical system being dealt with is described by more variables than there are physically independent degree of freedom. The…
Quantum mechanics has maintained over the years the reputation of being "the most obscure theory." It works perfectly well, but nobody seems to know why. It has been argued that the difficulty in understanding quantum theory is our failed…
Einstein's philosophy of physics (as clarified by Fine, Howard, and Held) was predicated on his Trennungsprinzip, a combination of separability and locality, without which he believed objectification, and thereby "physical thought" and…
The notion of incompressible momentum observables is introduced. It is shown that when the metric in a manifold has a certain form, a set of canonically conjugate variables Xk and Pk in which Pk are incompressible, can be constructed. Based…