Related papers: Methodological Realism and Quantum Mechanics
In a series of papers, a many-minds interpretation of quantum theory has been developed. The aim in these papers is to present an explicit mathematical formalism which constitutes a complete theory compatible with relativistic quantum field…
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…
Quantum Mechanics, almost 80 years after its arrival, is a well established and experimentally not falsified theory. It has predicted and explained a whole series of natural phenomena of a very delicate nature. But its interpretation has…
We present the quantum measurement problem as a serious physics problem. Serious because without a resolution, quantum theory is not complete, as it does not tell how one should - in principle - perform measurements. It is physical in the…
Conceptual problems in quantum mechanics result from the specific quantum concept of reality and require, for their solution, including the observer's consciousness into quantum theory of measurements. Most naturally this is achieved in the…
This pseudo-paper consists of excerpts drawn from two of my quantum-email samizdats. Section 1 draws a picture of a physical world whose essence is ``Darwinism all the way down.'' Section 2 outlines how quantum theory should be viewed in…
Along with weaving together observations, experiments, and theoretical constructs into a coherent mesh of understanding of the world around us, physics over its past five centuries has continuously refined the base concepts on which the…
Quantum mechanics challenges classical intuitions of space, time, and causality via the superposition principle, which allows systems to exist in multiple states simultaneously. Niels Bohr addressed these paradoxes through his…
This paper proposes a basic theory on physical reality, and a new foundation for quantum mechanics and classical mechanics. It does not only solve the problem of the arbitrariness on the operator ordering for the quantization procedure, but…
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.…
I will propose that the reality to which the quantum formalism implicitly refers is a kind of generalized history, the word history having here the same meaning as in the phrase sum-over-histories. This proposal confers a certain…
I begin by examining the question of the quantum limits of knowledge by briefly presenting the constraints of the theory that derive from its mathematical structure (in particular the no-go theorems formulated by von Neumann and Kochen and…
Finetuning and Naturalness are extra-empirical theory assessments that reflect our expectation how scientific theories should provide an intuitive understanding about the foundations underlying the observed phenomena. Recently, the absence…
After a summary of Bohr's views and their relation to Kant's theory of science, two fruitless lines of attack on the measurement problem are discussed: the way of the psi-ontologist and the way of the QBist. In the remainder of the paper…
I introduce a framework to distinguish two domains of physics - the manifest (i.e. the directly observable empirical records in terms of manifest configurations) and the non-manifest domain of physics (i.e. the things that the manifest…
The interpretation of quantum mechanics has been discussed since this theme first was brought up by Einstein and Bohr. This article describes a proposal for a new foundation of quantum theory, partly drawing upon ideas from statistical…
A century after the discovery of quantum mechanics, the meaning of quantum mechanics still remains elusive. This is largely due to the puzzling nature of the wave function, the central object in quantum mechanics. If we are realists about…
This chapter, from the Routledge Companion to the Philosophy of Physics (Eleanor Knox and Alastair Wilson, eds., 2021), is an overview of the constraints that relativity places on interpretations of quantum theory. It focuses on four main…
In this work we analyze the deep link between the 20th Century positivist re-foundation of physics and the famous measurement problem of quantum mechanics. We attempt to show why this is not an "obvious" nor "self evident" problem for the…
Intuitively, the more powerful a theory is, the greater the variety and quantity of ideas can be expressed through its formal language. Therefore, when comparing two theories concerning the same subject, it seems only reasonable to compare…