Related papers: Consistent Quantum Causes
Explaining observations in terms of causes and effects is central to all of empirical science. Correlations between entangled quantum particles, however, seem to defy such an explanation. To recover a causal picture in this case, some of…
The consistent histories formulation of the quantum theory of a closed system with pure initial state defines an infinite number of incompatible consistent sets, each of which gives a possible description of the physics. We investigate the…
The problem of using observed correlations to infer causal relations is relevant to a wide variety of scientific disciplines. Yet given correlations between just two classical variables, it is impossible to determine whether they arose from…
Quantum theory does not only predict probabilities, but also relative phases for any experiment, that involves measurements of an ensemble of systems at different moments of time. We argue, that any operational formulation of quantum theory…
This paper discusses the relation between the decoherent histories approach to quantum mechanics that is based on coarse-grained decoherent histories of a closed system, and the approximate quantum mechanics of measured subsystems, as in…
A review is given of recent work aimed at constructing a quantum theory of cosmology in which all observables refer to information measurable by observers inside the universe. At the classical level the algebra of observables should be…
The tomographic approach to quantum mechanics is revisited as a direct tool to investigate violation of Bell-like inequalities. Since quantum tomograms are well defined probability distributions, the tomographic approach is emphasized to be…
Nonlocality and contextuality are at the root of conceptual puzzles in quantum mechanics, and are key resources for quantum advantage in information-processing tasks. Bell nonlocality is best understood as the incompatibility between…
Quantum theory (QT) provides statistical predictions for various physical phenomena. The outcomes of these measurements are in general some numerical time series registered by some macroscopic instruments. The various empirical probability…
A resolution of the quantum measurement problem(s) using the consistent histories interpretation yields in a rather natural way a restriction on what an observer can know about a quantum system, one that is also consistent with some results…
We present a formulation of the decoherent (or consistent) histories quantum theory of closed systems starting with records of what histories happen. Alternative routes to a formulation of quantum theory like this one can be useful both for…
Decoherent histories quantum theory is reformulated with the assumption that there is one "real" fine-grained history, specified in a preferred complete set of sum-over-histories variables. This real history is described by embedding it in…
A central result in the foundations of quantum mechanics is the Kochen-Specker theorem. In short, it states that quantum mechanics is in conflict with classical models in which the result of a measurement does not depend on which other…
Motivated by the advances of quantum Darwinism and recognizing the role played by redundancy in identifying the small subset of quantum states with resilience characteristic of objective classical reality, we explore the implications of…
Inferring causal relations from experimental observations is of primal importance in science. Instrumental tests provide an essential tool for that aim, as they allow one to estimate causal dependencies even in the presence of unobserved…
For a system composed of two particles Bell's theorem asserts that averages of physical quantities determined from local variables must conform to a family of inequalities. In this work we show that a classical model containing a local…
It is known that the classical framework of causal models is not general enough to allow for causal reasoning about quantum systems. While the framework has been generalized in a variety of different ways to the quantum case, much of this…
The landscape of causal relations that can hold among a set of systems in quantum theory is richer than in classical physics. In particular, a pair of time-ordered systems can be related as cause and effect or as the effects of a common…
In a Bell test, the set of observed probability distributions complying with the principle of local realism is fully characterized by Bell inequalities. Quantum theory allows for a violation of these inequalities, which is famously regarded…
It is shown that when properly analyzed using principles consistent with the use of a Hilbert space to describe microscopic properties, quantum mechanics is a local theory: one system cannot influence another system with which it does not…