Related papers: Laws, Symmetries, and Reality
Quantum theory describes our universe incredibly successfully. To our classically-inclined brains, however, it is a bizarre description that requires a re-imagining of what fundamental reality, or "ontology", could look like. This thesis…
The true dynamical randomness is obtained as a natural fundamental property of deterministic quantum systems. It provides quantum chaos passing to the classical dynamical chaos under the ordinary semiclassical transition, which extends the…
The concept of number is fundamental to the formulation of any physical theory. We give a heuristic motivation for the reformulation of Quantum Mechanics in terms of non-standard real numbers called Quantum Real Numbers. The standard axioms…
Despite its apparent complexity, our world seems to be governed by simple laws of physics. This volume provides a philosophical introduction to such laws. I explain how they are connected to some of the central issues in philosophy, such as…
We discuss a new realistic interpretation of quantum mechanics based on discontinuous motion of particles. The historical and logical basis of discontinuous motion of particles is given. It proves that if there exists only one kind of…
We formulate physically-motivated axioms for a physical theory which for systems with a finite number of degrees of freedom uniquely lead to Quantum Mechanics as the only nontrivial consistent theory. Complex numbers and the existence of…
Quantum theory (QT) has been confirmed by numerous experiments, yet we still cannot fully grasp the meaning of the theory. As a consequence, the quantum world appears to us paradoxical. Here we shed new light on QT by being based on two…
Church's hypothesis and Godel's theorem may provide constraints on mental processes.As a relief quantum entanglement may lead to a definite proposal as regards the nature of reality and how much of it we are able to know and how do we know…
Underlying any theory of physics is a layer of conceptual frames. They connect the mathematical structures used in theoretical models with physical phenomena, but they also constitute our fundamental assumptions about reality. Many of the…
A recent concept in theoretical physics, motivated in string duality and M-theory, is the notion that not all quantum theories arise from quantising a classical system. Also, a given quantum model may possess more than just one classical…
We consider symmetry as a foundational concept in quantum mechanics and rewrite quantum mechanics and measurement axioms in this description. We argue that issues related to measurements and physical reality of states can be better…
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…
Assuming the validity of the equivalence principle in the quantum regime, we argue that one of the assumptions of the usual definition of quantum mechanics, namely separation between the ``classical'' detector and the ``quantum'' system,…
Uncertainty relations state that there exist certain incompatible measurements, to which the outcomes cannot be simultaneously predicted. While the exact incompatibility of quantum measurements dictated by such uncertainty relations can be…
The Hilbert space formalism describes causality as a statistical relation between initial experimental conditions and final measurement outcomes, expressed by the inner products of state vectors representing these conditions. This…
The basic physics disciplines of Maxwell's electrodynamics and Newton's mechanics have been thoroughly tested in the laboratory, but they can nevertheless also support nonphysical solutions. The unphysical nature of some dynamical…
The relationship between classical and quantum theory is of central importance to the philosophy of physics, and any interpretation of quantum mechanics has to clarify it. Our discussion of this relationship is partly historical and…
After the development of a self-consistent quantum formalism nearly a century ago, there ensued a quest to understand the often counterintuitive predictions of the theory. These endeavors invariably begin with the assumption of the "truth"…
A basic linearity of quantum dynamics, that density matrices are mapped linearly to density matrices, is proved very simply for a system that does not interact with anything else. It is assumed that at each time the physical quantities and…
Quantum mechanics, devoid of any additional assumption, does not give any theoretical constraint on the projection basis to be used for the measurement process. It is shown in this paper that it does neither allow any physical means for an…