Related papers: Elegance, Facts, and Scientific Truths
It is shown that quantum mechanics is a plausible statistical description of an ontology described by classical electrodynamics. The reason that no contradiction arises with various no-go theorems regarding the compatibility of QM with a…
Quantum mechanics (QM) has attracted a considerable amount of mysticism, in public opinion and even among academic researches, due to some of its conceptually puzzling features, such as the modification of reality by the observer and…
Despite its apparent complexity, our world seems to be governed by simple laws of physics. This volume provides a philosophical introduction to such laws. I explain how they are connected to some of the central issues in philosophy, such as…
The quantum-mechanical description of the world, including human observers, makes substantial use of entanglement. In order to understand this, we need to adopt concepts of truth, probability and time which are unfamiliar in modern…
Emergence of the classical world from the quantum substrate of our Universe is a long-standing conundrum. I describe three insights into the transition from quantum to classical that are based on the recognition of the role of the…
Metaphysics is traditionally conceived as aiming at the truth -- indeed, the most fundamental truths about the most general features of reality. Philosophical naturalists, urging that philosophical claims be grounded on science, have often…
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…
The laws of quantum mechanics are couched in subtle mathematical language. The laws are not usually stated in a compact pedagogical form. Here I present a possible way to correct this. Essential facts can be distilled into seven statements…
The gap between classical mechanics and quantum mechanics has an important interpretive implication: the Universe must have an irreducible fundamental level, which determines the properties of matter at higher levels of organization. We…
We discuss an apparent information paradox that arises in a materialist's description of the Universe if we assume that the Universe is 100% quantum. We discuss possible ways out of the paradox, including that Laws of Nature are not purely…
The aim of this essay is to propose a conception of mathematics that is fully consonant with naturalism. By that I mean the hypothesis that everything that exists is part of the natural world, which makes up a unitary whole.
Recent theoretical results confirm that quantum theory provides the possibility of new ways of performing efficient calculations. The most striking example is the factoring problem. It has recently been shown that computers that exploit…
In light of G\"{o}del's undecidability results (incomplete theorems) for math, quantum indeterminism indicates that physics and the Universe may be indeterministic, incomplete, and open in nature, and therefore demand no single unification…
Quantum theory is extremely successful in explaining most physical phenomena, and is not contradicted by any experiment. Yet, the theory has many puzzling features : the occurrence of probabilities, the unclear distinction between the…
The paper "Physics without determinism: Alternative interpretations of classical physics" [Phys. Rev. A, 100:062107, Dec 2019] defines finite information quantities (FIQ). A FIQ expresses the available information about the value of a…
Indistinguishability of particles is normally considered to be an inherently quantum property which cannot be possessed by a classical theory. However, Saunders has argued that this is incorrect, and that classically indistinguishable…
The aim of this work is to show how Einstein's quantum hypothesis leads immediately and necessarily to a departure from classical mechanics. First we note that the classical description and predictions are in terms of idealized measurements…
Alongside the development of quantum algorithms and quantum complexity theory in recent years, quantum techniques have also proved instrumental in obtaining results in classical (non-quantum) areas. In this paper we survey these results and…
The paper attempts to convince that the orthodox interpretation of quantum mechanics does not contradict philosophical realism by throwing light onto certain properties of quantum systems that seem to have escaped attention as yet. The…
According to the so-called ``Quantum Darwinist'' approach, the emergence of ``classical islands'' from a quantum background is assumed to obey a (selection) principle of maximal information. We illustrate this idea by considering the…