Related papers: Theory-Independent Realism
The emergence of an objective reality in line with the laws of the microscopic world has been the focus of longstanding debates. Recent approaches seem to have reached a consensus at least with respect to one aspect, namely, that the…
The debate instigated by the seminal works of Einstein, Podolsky, Rosen, and Bell, put the notions of realism and nonlocality at the core of almost all philosophical and physical discussions underlying the foundations of quantum mechanics.…
We propose an interpretation of physics named potentiality realism. This view, which can be applied to classical as well as to quantum physics, regards potentialities (i.e. intrinsic, objective propensities for individual events to obtain)…
The theories of pre-quantum physics are standardly seen as representing physical systems and their properties. Quantum mechanics in its standard form is a more problematic case: here, interpretational problems have led to doubts about the…
The present study attempts to provide a consistent and coherent account of what the world could be like, given the conceptual framework and results of contemporary quantum theory. It is suggested that standard quantum mechanics can, and…
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…
Contrary to classical physics, which was strongly objective i.e. could be interpreted as a description of mind-independent reality, standard quantum mechanics (SQM) is only weakly objective, that is to say, its statements, though…
We attempt to contribute some novel points of view to the "foundations of quantum mechanics", using mathematical tools from "quantum probability theory" (such as the theory of operator algebras). We first introduce an abstract algebraic…
The implications of the physical theory of quantum mechanics on the question of realism is much a subject of sustaining interest, while the background questions among physicists on how to think about all the theoretical notion and…
Realism -- the idea that the concepts in physical theories refer to 'things' existing in the real world -- is introduced as a tool to analyze the status of the wave-function. Although the physical entities are recognized by the existence of…
Dualities in physics have challenged traditional forms of scientific realism by undermining the idea that theories describe a unique underlying ontology. In this paper, we develop a new perspective on scientific realism that responds to…
We define realism using a slightly modified version of the EPR criterion of reality. This version is strong enough to show that relativity is incomplete. We show that this definition of realism is nonetheless compatible with the general…
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…
There is a significant body of literature, which includes Itamar Pitowksy's "Betting on Outcomes of Measurements," that sheds light on the structure of quantum mechanics, and the ways in which it differs from classical mechanics, by casting…
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…
We provide a theory independent framework to quantify coherence. In comparison with Bell's theory independent approach to quantum nonlocality, we characterize a general coherence phenomenon with statistics arising from sequential…
The properties which give quantum mechanics its unique character - unitarity, complementarity, non-commutativity, uncertainty, nonlocality - derive from the algebraic structure of Hermitian operators acting on the wavefunction in complex…
The formulation of a consistent measurement theory for relativistic quantum fields has become a problem of growing foundational and practical significance. Standard non-relativistic measurement models fail to incorporate the essential…
According to scientific realism, science gives us an approximately true description of what the world is like. But what does it mean? In this chapter, we focus on the ontological and metaphysical aspects of this discussion. That is, we are…
One of the basic observations of the classical world is that physical entities are real and can be distinguished from each other. However, within quantum theory, the idea of physical realism is not well established. A framework to analyse…