Related papers: State Vectors and Physical States
We celebrate this year hundred years of quantum mechanics but there is still no consensus regarding its interpretation and limitations. In this article we advocate the statistical contextual interpretation which is free of paradoxes. State…
According to quantum theory, pure physical states correspond to equivalence classes of state vectors, where any two members of one class differ by a complex factor. The point is that such a factor does not change the probability for the…
We establish three impossibility results regarding our knowledge of the quantum state of the universe. Suppose the universal quantum state is a typical unit vector in a high-dimensional subspace $\mathscr{H}_0$ of Hilbert space…
Measurement is a fundamental notion in the usual approximate quantum mechanics of measured subsystems. Probabilities are predicted for the outcomes of measurements. State vectors evolve unitarily in between measurements and by reduction of…
A characteristical property of a classical physical theory is that the observables are real functions taking an exact outcome on every (pure) state; in a quantum theory, at the contrary, a given observable on a given state can take several…
It has been shown that quantum paradoxes have followed from one special assumption, i.e., from attributing basic physical meaning to Hamiltonian eigenfunctions and representing all physical states by vectors of the Hilbert space spanned on…
We propose a novel interpretation of Quantum Mechanics, which can resolve the outstanding conflict between the principles of locality and realism and offers new insight on the so-called weak values of physical observables. The discussion is…
Quantum statistics originate from the physics of state preparation. It is therefore wrong to think of quantum states as fundamental. In fact, quantum states are merely summaries of dynamical processes that randomize the properties of the…
This article presents a general discussion of several aspects of our present understanding of quantum mechanics. The emphasis is put on the very special correlations that this theory makes possible: they are forbidden by very general…
By representing an event as the joint state of a detector-timer couple that interact with a system, we recover the familiar tensor product structure, used to describe spatially separated systems, in the context of timelike events.…
If the quantum mechanical description of reality is not complete and a hidden variable theory is possible, what arises is the problem to explain where the rates of the outcomes of statistical experiments come from, as already noticed by…
We explore further the suggestion to describe a pre- and post-selected system by a two-state, which is determined by two conditions. Starting with a formal definition of a two-state Hilbert space and basic operations, we systematically…
The quantum-mechanical state vector is not directly observable even though it is the fundamental variable that appears in Schrodinger's equation. In conventional time-dependent perturbation theory, the state vector must be calculated before…
It is shown how, given a "probability data table" for a quantum or classical system, the representation of states and measurement outcomes as vectors in a real vector space follows in a natural way. Some properties of the resulting sets of…
Following the argument of Pusey, Barrett and Rudolph (Nature Phys. 8:476, 2012), new interest has been raised on whether one can interpret state-vectors (pure states) in a statistical way ($\psi$-epistemic theories), or if each of them…
Quantum experiments detect particles, but they reveal information about wave properties. No matter how quanta are detected, they always express the local net state of the corresponding wave-function. The mechanism behind this process is…
One of the most central and controversial element of quantum mechanics is the use of non zero vectors of a Hilbert space (or, more generally, of one dimension subspaces) for representing the state of a quantum system. In particular, the…
The phenomenon of quantum entanglement is explained in a way which is fully consistent with Einstein's Special Theory of Relativity. A subtle flaw is identified in the logic supporting the view that Bell's Inequality precludes all local…
Evolution of a physical quantum state vector is described as governed by two distinct physical laws: Continuous, unitary time evolution and a relativistically covariant reduction process. In previous literature, it was concluded that a…
It is shown that a general model for particle detection in combination with a linear application of the Wigner rotations, which correspond to momentum-dependent changes of the particle spin under Lorentz transformations, to the state of a…