Related papers: Questions and Physical Reality -Simple Philosophic…
The emergence of an objective reality in line with the laws of the microscopic world has been the focus of longstanding debates. Recent approaches seem to have reached a consensus at least with respect to one aspect, namely, that the…
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…
The analysis of Pusey, Barrett and Rudolph aims to show there can be no objective physical reality which underlies, and is more general than, the state vector. But there appears to be a gap in their reasoning. To show their result, they use…
It is argued that a realistic interpretation of quantum mechanics is possible and useful. Current interpretations, from Copenhagen to many worlds are critically revisited. The difficulties for intuitive models of quantum physics are pointed…
First, this article considers the nature of quantum reality (the reality responsible for quantum phenomena) and the concept of realism (our ability to represent this reality) in quantum theory, in conjunction with the roles of locality,…
At present, quantum theory leaves unsettled which quantities ontologically, physically exist in a quantum system. Do observables such as energy and position have meaningful values only at the precise moment of measurement, as in the…
Despite the obvious utility of the concept, it has often been argued that time does not exist. I take the opposite perspective: let's imagine that time does exist, and the universe is described by a quantum state obeying ordinary…
The twentieth century saw two fundamental revolutions in physics -- relativity and quantum. Daily use of these theories can numb the sense of wonder at their immense empirical success. Does their instrumental effectiveness stand on the rock…
Nature allows one to explore a manifold of remarkable quantum effects. Most prominently, quantum entanglement can be observed in many-particle systems, between multiple quantized fields, and in hybrid combinations thereof. This diversity,…
A controversy that has arisen many times over in disparate contexts is whether quantum coherences between eigenstates of certain quantities are fact or fiction. We present a pedagogical introduction to the debate in the form of a…
Stapp and others have proposed that reality involves a fundamental life process, or creative process. It is shown how this process description may be unified with the description that derives from quantum physics. The methods of the quantum…
Some relations between physics and finitary and infinitary mathematics are explored in the context of a many-minds interpretation of quantum theory. The analogy between mathematical ``existence'' and physical ``existence'' is considered…
The problem of understanding quantum mechanics is in large measure the problem of finding appropriate ways of thinking about the spatial and temporal aspects of the physical world. The standard, substantival, set-theoretic conception of…
We show that one may interpret physical reality as random fields in space-time. These have a probability given by the expectation of a coherent state projection operator, called the Q-function. The resulting dynamical evolution includes…
We look into the ontology of quantum theory as distinct from that of the classical theory in the sciences, following a broadly Kantian tradition and distinguishing between the noumenal and phenomenal realities where the former is…
In the context of theories of the connection between mind and brain, physicalism is the demand that all is basically purely physical. But the concept of "physical" embodied in this demand is characterized essentially by the properties of…
We discuss the physical nature of quantum information, in particular focussing on tasks that are achievable by some physical realizations of qubits but not by others.
Recently, it has been argued that quantum mechanics is complete, and that quantum states vectors are necessarily in one-to-one correspondence with the elements of reality, under the assumptions that quantum theory is correct and that…
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…
At the primary level of reality as described by quantum field theory, a fundamental particle like an electron represents a stable, discrete, propagating excited state of its underlying quantum field. QFT also tells us that the lowest vacuum…