Related papers: Concerning Dice and Divinity
This paper traces an intellectual journey or \textit{Way} (in the sense of a Tao) that starts with some unfinished work of Gian-Carlo Rota on making a logic of equivalence relations or partitions. Rota understood the category-theoretic…
Classical mechanics is based upon a mechanical picture of nature that is fundamentally incorrect. It has been replaced at the basic level by a radically different theory: quantum mechanics. This change entails an enormous shift in our basic…
This note is sketching a simple and natural mathematical construction for explaining the probabilistic nature of quantum mechanics. It employs nonstandard analysis and is based on Feynman's interpretation of the Heisenberg uncertainty…
The many-worlds interpretation (MWI) of quantum mechanics is studied from an unprecedented ontological perspective based on the reality of (semi-) deterministic parallel worlds in the interpretation. It is demonstrated that with thanks to…
Norbert Wiener and J.B.S. Haldane suggested during the early thirties that the profound changes in our conception of matter entailed by quantum theory opens the way for our thoughts, and other experiential or mind-like qualities, to play a…
A proper knowledge of the reality of a physical theory is important to get an understanding of empirical phenomena. Despite its extraordinary predictive successes, the orthodox (also known as the Copenhagen) theory provides an indigestible…
Quantum theory is a tremendously successful physical theory, but nevertheless suffers from two serious problems: the measurement problem and the problem of interpretational underdetermination. The latter, however, is largely overlooked as a…
Before Alan Turing made his crucial contributions to the theory of computation, he studied the question of whether quantum mechanics could throw light on the nature of free will. This article investigates the roles of quantum mechanics and…
For the first time it is shown that the logic of quantum mechanics can be derived from Classical Physics. An orthomodular lattice of propositions, characteristic of quantum logic, is constructed for manifolds in Einstein's theory of general…
This work explores the connection between logical independence and the algebraic structure of quantum mechanics. Building on results by Brukner et al., it introduces the notion of \textit{onto-epistemic ignorance}: situations in which the…
The job of a physicist is to describe Nature. General features, hypotheses and theories help to describe physics phenomena at a more abstract, fundamental level, and are sometimes tacitly assigned some sort of real existence; doing so…
The causal interpretation of quantum mechanics, as originally stated by deBroglie and Bohm, had several attractive features. Among these is the possibility that it could address some of the most fundamental questions on quantum phenomena.…
According to quantum theory, randomness is a fundamental property of the universe yet classical physics is mostly deterministic. In this article I show that it is possible for deterministic systems to arise from random ones and discuss the…
Quantum mechanics is very odd. It presents both an immensely practical and a deeply troubling conception of the physical world. As such, its uses stretch from optimizing nanoelectronics to examining the very nature of reality. In this…
We review here the main contributions of Einstein to the quantum theory. To put them in perspective we first give an account of Physics as it was before him. It is followed by a brief account of the problem of black body radiation which…
Since quantum mechanics (QM) was formulated, many voices have claimed this to be the basis of free will in the human beings. Basically, they argue that free will is possible because there is an ontological indeterminism in the natural laws,…
Quantum mechanics predicts many surprising phenomena, including the two-slit interference of electrons. It has often been claimed that these phenomena cannot be understood in classical terms. But the meaning of "classical" is often not…
In this article we present a possible way to make usual quantum mechanics fully compatible with physical realism, defined as the statement that the goal of physics is to study entities of the natural world, existing independently from any…
All investigators working on the foundations of quantum mechanics agree that the theory has profoundly modified our conception of reality. But there ends the consensus. The unproblematic formalism of the theory gives rise to a number of…
The theory of probability and the quantum theory, the one mathematical and the other physical, are related in that each admits a number of very different interpretations. It has been proposed that the conceptual problems of the quantum…