Related papers: Experience in quantum physics: toward a theory of …
Quantum theory provides an extremely accurate description of fundamental processes in physics. It thus seems likely that the theory is applicable beyond the, mostly microscopic, domain in which it has been tested experimentally. Here we…
I take a pragmatist perspective on quantum theory. This is not a view of the world described by quantum theory. In this view quantum theory itself does not describe the physical world, nor our observatons, experiences or opinions of it.…
We develop a new interpretation of quantum theory by combining insights from extended Wigner's friend scenarios and quantum causal modelling. In this interpretation, which synthesizes ideas from relational quantum mechanics and consistent…
Quantum mechanics is one of our most successful physical theories; its predictions agree with experimental observations to an extremely high accuracy. However, the bare formalism of quantum theory does not provide straightforward answers to…
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…
Quantum theory makes the most accurate empirical predictions and yet it lacks simple, comprehensible physical principles from which the theory can be uniquely derived. A broad class of probabilistic theories exist which all share some…
Predictions of quantum theory have been confirmed experimentally in the microscopic domain with no known exceptions. This success motivates physicists to assume universal validity of the theory. To put the predictions of the quantum theory…
It is commonly expected that quantum theory is universal, in that it describes the world at all scales. Yet, quantum effects at the macroscopic scale continue to elude our experimental observation. This fact is commonly attributed to…
The usual formulation of quantum theory is rather abstract. In recent work I have shown that we can, nevertheless, obtain quantum theory from five reasonable axioms. Four of these axioms are obviously consistent with both classical…
The notorious Wigner's friend thought experiment (and modifications thereof) has in recent years received renewed interest especially due to new arguments that force us to question some of the fundamental assumptions of quantum theory. In…
It has been suggested, on the one hand, that quantum states are just states of knowledge; and, on the other, that quantum theory is merely a theory of correlations. These suggestions are confronted with problems about the nature of…
The paradox of Wigner's friend challenges the objectivity of description in quantum theory. A pragmatist interpretation can meet this challenge by judicious appeal to decoherence. On this interpretation, quantum theory provides situated…
In any given experimental scenario, the rules of quantum theory provide statistical distributions that the observed outcomes are expected to follow. The set formed by all these distributions contains the imprint of quantum theory, capturing…
It is shown that the basic equations of quantum theory can be obtained from a straightforward application of logical inference to experiments for which there is uncertainty about individual events and for which the frequencies of the…
In the Bayesian approach to probability theory, probability quantifies a degree of belief for a single trial, without any a priori connection to limiting frequencies. In this paper we show that, despite being prescribed by a fundamental…
The predictions that quantum theory makes about the outcomes of measurements are generally probabilistic. This has raised the question whether quantum theory can be considered complete, or whether there could exist alternative theories that…
In order to relate the probabilistic predictions of quantum theory uniquely to measurement results, one has to conceive of an ensemble of identically prepared copies of the quantum system under study. Since the universe is the total domain…
The probabilistic predictions of quantum theory are conventionally obtained from a special probabilistic axiom. But that is unnecessary because all the practical consequences of such predictions follow from the remaining, non-probabilistic,…
It is commonly thought that observers in distinct branches of an Everettian multiverse cannot communicate without violating the linearity of quantum theory. Here we show a counterexample, demonstrating that inter-branch communication is in…
There exist dozens of interpretations of quantum theory, but they do not seem to contribute much to understanding the theory. This paper attempts to clarify some issues that are discussed in those interpretations. The main keywords are:…