Related papers: Do quantum states evolve? Apropos of Marchildon's …
Quantum mechanics forces us to reconsider certain aspects of classical causality. The 'central mystery' of quantum mechanics manifests in different ways, depending on the interpretation. This mystery can be formulated as the possibility of…
Why do quantum evolutions occur and why do they stop at certain points? In classical thermodynamics affinity was introduced to predict in which direction an irreversible process proceeds. In this paper the quantum mechanical counterpart of…
A persistent focus on the concept of emergence as a core element of the scientific method allows a clean separation, insofar as this is possible, of the physical and philosophical aspects of the problem of outcomes in quantum mechanics. The…
Insofar as quantum computation is faster than classical, it appears to be irreversible. In all quantum algorithms found so far the speed-up depends on the extra-dynamical irreversible projection representing quantum measurement. Quantum…
Standard quantum theory admits naturally statistical ensembles that are both pre-selected and post-selected, i.e., they involve both an initial and a final state. We argue that there is no compelling physical reason to preclude a…
Einstein initially objected to the probabilistic aspect of quantum mechanics - the idea that God is playing at dice. Later he changed his ground, and focussed instead on the point that the Copenhagen Interpretation leads to what Einstein…
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…
Mermin's "shut up and calculate!" somehow summarizes the most widely accepted view on quantum mechanics. This conception has led to a rather constraining way to think and understand the quantum world. Nonetheless, a closer look at the…
We consider the hypothesis that quantum mechanics is an approximation to another, cosmological theory, accurate only for the description of subsystems of the universe. Quantum theory is then to be derived from the cosmological theory by…
Many scientists seeking to understand the quantum mechanics of measurement situations (Copenhagen quantum theory) agree on its overwhelmingly successful algorithms to predict the outcomes of laboratory measurements but disagree on what…
The Born postulate can be reduced to its deterministic content that only applies to eigenvectors of observables: the standard probabilistic interpretation of generic states then follows from algebraic properties of repeated measurements and…
Many theoretical predictions derived from quantum mechanics have been confirmed experimentally during the last 80 years. However, interpretative aspects have long been subject to debate. Among them, the question of the existence of hidden…
The notion of "closed systems" in Quantum Mechanics is discussed. For this purpose, we study two models of a quantum-mechanical system $P$ spatially far separated from the "rest of the universe" $Q$. Under reasonable assumptions on the…
The study of quantum systems evolving from initial states to distinguishable, orthogonal final states is important for information processing applications such as quantum computing and quantum metrology. However, for most unitary evolutions…
It is shown that a coherent understanding of all quantized phenomena, including those governed by unitary evolution equations as well as those related to irreversible quantum measurements, can be achieved in a scenario of successive…
The conceptual setting of quantum mechanics is subject to an ongoing debate from its beginnings until now. The consequences of the apparent differences between quantum statistics and classical statistics range from the philosophical…
The question about the existence of so-called ``hidden'' variables in quantum mechanics and the perception of the completeness of quantum mechanics are two sides of the same coin. Quantum analytical mechanics constitutes a completion of…
The gap between classical mechanics and quantum mechanics has an important interpretive implication: the Universe must have an irreducible fundamental level, which determines the properties of matter at higher levels of organization. We…
The many-worlds interpretation (MWI) of quantum mechanics poses a simple question. What would reality look like if everything evolved in time according to the same quantum equations? There is an attractive consistency to treating…
An intricate quantum statistical effect guides us to a deterministic, non-causal quantum universe with given fixed initial and final state density matrix. A concept is developed on how and where something like macroscopic physics can…