Related papers: Anthropic interpretation of quantum theory

Selection effects in cosmology are often invoked to "explain" why some of the fundamental constant of Nature, and in particular the cosmological constant, take on the value they do in our Universe. We briefly review this probabilistic…

Since its inception, many physicists have seen in quantum mechanics the possibility, if not the necessity, of bringing cognitive aspects into the play, which were instead absent, or unnoticed, in the previous classical theories. In this…

Modal interpretations have the ambition to construe quantum mechanics as an objective, man-independent description of physical reality. Their second leading idea is probabilism: quantum mechanics does not completely fix physical reality but…

The question whether quantum measurements reflect some underlying objective reality has no generally accepted answer. We show that description of such reality is possible under natural conditions such as linearity and causality, although in…

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…

We revisit anthropic arguments purporting to explain the measured value of the cosmological constant. We argue that different ways of assigning probabilities to candidate universes lead to totally different anthropic predictions. As an…

Quantum theory is a tremendously successful physical theory, but nevertheless suffers from two serious problems: the measurement problem and the problem of interpretational underdetermination. The latter, however, is largely overlooked as a…

Probabilities may be subjective or objective; we are concerned with both kinds of probability, and the relationship between them. The fundamental theory of objective probability is quantum mechanics: it is argued that neither Bohr's…

The traditional, standard approach to quantum theory is to assume that the theory ``really'' contains only unitary physical dynamics--i.e., that the only physically quantifiable evolution is that given by the time-dependent Schrodinger…

Quantum theory is commonly formulated in complex Hilbert spaces. However, the question of whether complex numbers need to be given a fundamental role in the theory has been debated since its pioneering days. Recently it has been shown that…

The notion of objective probability or chance, as a physical trait of the world, has proved elusive; the identification of chances with actual frequencies does not succeed. An adequate theory of chance should explain not only the connection…

A hypothetical formulation of quantum mechanics is presented so as to reconcile it with macro-realism. On the analogy drawn from thermodynamics, an objective description of wave packet reduction is postulated, in which a characteristic…

Despite its enormous empirical success, the formalism of quantum theory still raises fundamental questions: why is nature described in terms of complex Hilbert spaces, and what modifications of it could we reasonably expect to find in some…

Proponents of the Everett interpretation of Quantum Theory have made efforts to show that to an observer in a branch, everything happens as if the projection postulate were true without postulating it. In this paper, we will indicate that…

The usual conjectures of quantum measurements approaches, inspired from the traditional interpretation of Heisenberg's ("uncertainty") relations, are proved as being incorrect. A group of reconsidered conjectures and a corresponding new…

Classical physics and quantum physics suggest two meta-physical types of reality: the classical notion of a objectively definite reality with properties "all the way down," and the quantum notion of an objectively indefinite type of…

The usage of the anthropic principle in modern cosmology is reviewed. It is argued that its recent use to explain the observedvalues of cosmological parameters as most probable values for an ensemble of universes, is not justified. However,…

Realist, no-collapse interpretations of quantum mechanics, such as Everett's, face the probability problem: how to justify the norm-squared (Born) rule from the wavefunction alone. While any basis-independent measure can only be…

We reconsider a well known problem of quantum theory, i.e. the so called measurement (or macro-objectification) problem, and we rederive the fact that it gives rise to serious problems of interpretation. The novelty of our approach derives…

In this paper we attempt to analyze the concept of quantum probability within quantum computation and quantum computational logic. While the subjectivist interpretation of quantum probability explains it as a reliable predictive tool for an…