Related papers: Bohmian Histories and Decoherent Histories
We investigate conservation laws in the quantum mechanics of closed systems. We review an argument showing that exact decoherence implies the exact conservation of quantities that commute with the Hamiltonian including the total energy and…
In its standard formulation, quantum mechanics presents a very serious inconvenience: given a quantum system, there is no possibility at all to unambiguously (causally) connect a particular feature of its final state with some specific…
We give an explicit, rigorous framework for calculating quantum probabilities in a model theory of quantum gravity. Specifically, we construct the decoherence functional for the Wheeler-DeWitt quantization of a flat…
Using the Gell-Mann and Hartle formalism of generalized quantum mechanics of closed systems, we study the classical limit of coarse-grained spacetime histories and their decoherence. The system under consideration is one-dimensional and…
We investigate whether quantum history theories can be consistent with Bayesian reasoning and whether such an analysis helps clarify the interpretation of such theories. First, we summarise and extend recent work categorising two different…
We consider a number of aspects of the problem of defining time observables in quantum theory. Time observables are interesting quantities in quantum theory because they often cannot be associated with self-adjoint operators. Their…
A major problem in the consistent-histories approach to quantum theory is contending with the potentially large number of consistent sets of history propositions. One possibility is to find a scheme in which a unique set is selected in some…
Interpretational questions that arise in the Consistent Histories formulation of quantum mechanics are illustrated by the familiar example of a beam passing through multiple slits.
The quantum theory of decoherence plays an important role in a pragmatist interpretation of quantum theory. It governs the descriptive content of claims about values of physical magnitudes and offers advice on when to use quantum…
It is often argued that measurable predictions of Bohmian mechanics cannot be distinguished from those of a theory with arbitrarily modified particle velocities satisfying the same equivariance equation. By considering the wave function of…
We discuss the use of histories labelled by a continuous time in the approach to consistent-histories quantum theory in which propositions about the history of the system are represented by projection operators on a Hilbert space. This…
It is shown how consistent histories quantum cosmology can be realised through Isham's Histories Projection Operator consistent histories scheme. This is done by using an affine algebra instead of a canonical one and also by using cocycle…
The measurement process for hidden-configuration formulations of quantum mechanics is analysed. It is shown how a satisfactory description of quantum measurement can be given in this framework. The unified treatment of hidden-configuration…
We attempt to contribute some novel points of view to the "foundations of quantum mechanics", using mathematical tools from "quantum probability theory" (such as the theory of operator algebras). We first introduce an abstract algebraic…
By means of the examples of classical and Bohmian quantum mechanics, we illustrate the well-known ideas of Boltzmann as to how one gets from laws defined for the universe as a whole to dynamical relations describing the evolution of…
This dissertation investigates questions arising in the consistent histories formulation of the quantum mechanics of closed systems. Various criteria for approximate consistency are analysed. The connection between the Dowker-Halliwell…
We examine the relationship between the decoherence of quantum-mechanical histories of a closed system (as discussed by Gell-Mann and Hartle) and environmentally-induced diagonalization of the density operator for an open system. We study a…
The incompatibility between the treatment of time in the classical and in the quantum theory results in the so-called problem of time in canonical quantum gravity. For this reason, attempts have been made to devise algorithms of…
For a wide set of quantum systems it is demonstrated that the quantum regime can be considered as the transient phase while the final classical statistical regime is a permanent state. A basis where exact matrix decoherence appears for…
The origin of the phenomenological deterministic laws that approximately govern the quasiclassical domain of familiar experience is considered in the context of the quantum mechanics of closed systems such as the universe as a whole. We…