Related papers: The importance of the observer in science
I flesh out the sense in which the informational approach to interpreting quantum mechanics, as defended by Pitowsky and Bub and lately by a number of other authors, is (neo-)Bohrian. I argue that on this approach, quantum mechanics…
To understand and explain process behaviour we need to be able to see it, and decide its significance, i.e. be able to tell a story about its behaviours. This paper describes a few of the modelling challenges that underlie monitoring and…
Many systems involve numerous interacting parts and the whole system can have properties that the individual parts do not. I take this novelty as the defining characteristic of an emergent property. Other characteristics associated with…
Contextuality is regarded as a non-classical feature, challenging our everyday intuition; quantum contextuality is currently seen as a resource for many applications in quantum computation, being responsible for quantum advantage over…
It is hypothesised, following Conrad et al. (1988) (http://www.tcm.phy.cam.ac.uk/~bdj10/papers/urbino.html) that quantum physics is not the ultimate theory of nature, but merely a theoretical account of the phenomena manifested in nature…
A variant of the von Neumann-Wigner Interpretation is proposed. It does not make use of the familiar language of wave functions and observers. Instead it pictures the state of the physical world as a vector in a Fock space and, therefore…
Energy has no definition, except that given by a conservation principle which essentially amounts to defining it as the elements of an open list of unknown cardinality. Entropy, identified by Shannon as information we lack, has too many…
In this work we discuss the notion of observable - both quantum and classical - from a new point of view. In classical mechanics, an observable is represented as a function (measurable, continuous or smooth), whereas in (von Neumann's…
Recently, the presence in the literature (also recent) of voluminous discussions about the interpretation of quantum mechanics has been labelled as scandalous. We claim that a weak point of the debate which hosted such a conclusion is a…
What Niels Bohr called the `epistemological lesson' of `complementarity' was the result of reasoning analogically from the classical conception of a mechanical state to a new quantum mechanical conception of an `object' in a mechanical…
We offer a fresh perspective on the relational interpretation of quantum mechanics as a way of thinking about the world described by quantum theory based on quantifiable notions of information. This allows us to provide a definition of a…
The hypothesis of a discrete fabric of the universe--the "Planck scale"--is always on stage, since it solves mathematical and conceptual problems in the infinitely small. However, it clashes with special relativity, which is designed for…
In physics, there is the prevailing intuition that we are part of a unique external world, and that the goal of physics is to understand and describe this world. This assumption of the fundamentality of objective reality is often seen as a…
The relational approach to quantum states asserts that the physical description of quantum systems is always relative to something or someone. In relational quantum mechanics (RQM) it is relative to other quantum systems, in the…
Evidence for fine-tuning of physical parameters suitable for life can perhaps be explained by almost any combination of providence, coincidence or multiverse. A multiverse usually includes parts unobservable to us, but if the theory for it…
To understand the foundations of quantum mechanics, we have to think carefully about how theoretical concepts are rooted in -- and limited by -- the nature of experience, as Bohr attempted to show. Geometrical pictures of physical phenomena…
Complexity remains one of the central challenges in science and technology. Although several approaches at defining and/or quantifying complexity have been proposed, at some point each of them seems to run into intrinsic limitations or…
Recent extended formulations of the Wigner's friend thought experiment throw the measurement problem of quantum mechanics into sharper relief. Here I respond to an invitation by Renner to provide a consistent and concrete set of rules for…
Consciousness and quantum mechanics are among the most puzzling phenomena studied in the sciences. Some scholars suggest they are related, though others think this claim commits a "minimization of mystery" fallacy. The aim of this…
In the past several years, observational entropy has been developed as both a (time-dependent) quantum generalization of Boltzmann entropy, and as a rather general framework to encompass classical and quantum equilibrium and non-equilibrium…