Related papers: Causality implies formal state collapse
We expect a theory of Quantum Gravity to be both probabilistic and have indefinite causal structure. Indefinite causal structure poses particular problems for theory formulation since many of the core ideas used in the usual approaches to…
Effective theories are non-local at the scale of the eliminated heavy particles modes. The gradient expansion which represents such non-locality must be truncated to have treatable models. This step leads to the proliferation of the degrees…
A two boundary quantum mechanics without time ordered causal structure is advocated as consistent theory. The apparent causal structure of usual "near future" macroscopic phenomena is attributed to a cosmological asymmetry and to rules…
The statistics of local measurements of joint quantum systems can sometimes be used to distinguish the spatiotemporal structure in which they were measured. We first prove that every bipartite separable density matrix is temporally…
Perhaps the quantum state represents information about reality, and not reality directly. Wave function collapse is then possibly no more mysterious than a Bayesian update of a probability distribution given new data. We consider models for…
More often than not, recently popular structuralist interpretations of physical theories leave the central concept of a structure insufficiently precisified. The incipient causal sets approach to quantum gravity offers a paradigmatic case…
The collapse of a quantum state can be understood as a mathematical way to construct a joint probability density even for operators that do not commute. We can formalize that construction as a non-commutative, non-associative collapse…
The paper elucidates the physical basis of experimental results on superluminal signal velocity. It will be made plausible that superluminal signals do not violate the principle of causality but they can shorten the luminal vacuum time span…
Bell theorems show how to experimentally falsify local realism. Conclusive falsification is highly desirable as it would provide support for the most profoundly counterintuitive feature of quantum theory - nonlocality. Despite the…
The idea that events obey a definite causal order is deeply rooted in our understanding of the world and at the basis of the very notion of time. But where does causal order come from, and is it a necessary property of nature? We address…
As toy models for space-time on the Planck scale, we consider examples of fermion systems in discrete space-time which are composed of one or two particles defined on two up to nine space-time points. We study the self-organization of the…
The specific advance of this work is to propose a mechanism by which superpositions collapse during measurement of the separated subsystems of entangled quantum states. It is shown how the phase that locks together entangled states plays a…
Quantum theory in a global space-time gives rise to non-local correlations, which cannot be explained causally in a satisfactory way; this motivates the study of theories with reduced global assumptions. Oreshkov, Costa, and Brukner (2012)…
The theory of causal fermion systems is a recent approach to fundamental physics. Giving quantum mechanics, general relativity and quantum field theory as limiting cases, it is a candidate for a unified physical theory. The dynamics is…
A logical model of spatiotemporal structures is pictured as a succession of processes in time. One usual way to formalize time structure is to assume the global existence of time points and then collect some of them to form time intervals…
To resolve the quantum measurement problem, we propose an objective collapse theory in which both the wavefunction and the process of collapse are regarded as ontologically objective. The theory, which we call the entangling-speed-threshold…
The design of scientific experiments deserves its own variation of formal verification to catch cases where scientists made important mistakes, such as forgetting to take confounding variables into account. One of the most fundamental…
Predictions for measurement outcomes in physical theories are usually computed by combining two distinct notions: a state, describing the physical system, and an observable, describing the measurement which is performed. In quantum theory,…
It is considered to re-formulate quantum theory as it appears: A theory of continuous and causal time evolution, interrupted by discontinuous and stochastic jumps. To develop the (missing) theory of jumps a heuristic-phenomenological…
Some versions of quantum theory treat wave function collapse as a fundamental physical phenomenon to be described by explicit laws. One motivation is to find a consistent unification of quantum theory and gravity, in which collapse prevents…