Related papers: Consistent Histories may be strange, but so is sta…
I offer an account of how the quantum theory we have helps us explain so much. The account depends on a pragmatist interpretation of the theory: This takes a quantum state to serve solely as a source of sound advice to physically situated…
Where does what happens happen in a quantum system? The standard textbook formulation of quantum mechanics provides a strange, imprecise and yet successful-in-practice answer to this question. In the struggle to unify our understanding of…
The quantum world is fascinating. It presents a description of nature that defies our most rooted concepts about what reality is. For example, quantum objects possess \lq\lq spooky\rq\rq\ properties that allow them to be in multiple places…
The consistent histories approach to quantum mechanics is traditionally based on linearly ordered sequences of events. We extend the histories formalism to sets of events whose causal ordering is described by directed acyclic graphs. The…
Quantum theory is formulated as the only consistent way to manipulate probability amplitudes. The crucial ingredient is a consistency constraint: if there are two different ways to compute an amplitude the two answers must agree. This…
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…
The classical notions of continuity and mechanical causality are left in order to refor- mulate the Quantum Theory starting from two principles: I) the intrinsic randomness of quantum process at microphysical level, II) the projective…
Doubts are raised concerning the usual interpretation of the alleged failure, by quantum mechanics, of the distributive law of classical logic. The difficulty raised by incompatible sets of observables is overcome within an epistemic…
The inherent difficulty in talking about quantum decoherence in the context of quantum cosmology is that decoherence requires subsystems, and cosmology is the study of the whole Universe. Consistent histories gave a possible answer to this…
The extravagances of quantum mechanics never fail to enrich daily the debate around natural philosophy. Entanglement, non-locality, collapse, many worlds, many minds, and subjectivism have challenged generations of thinkers. Its approach…
Quantum mechanics can emerge from classical statistics. A typical quantum system describes an isolated subsystem of a classical statistical ensemble with infinitely many classical states. The state of this subsystem can be characterized by…
Sorkin's coevent interpretation shifts the focus of quantum logic from the structure of a propositional lattice to the nature of truth valuations thereon. We apply this shift in emphasis to a simple formulation of the consistent histories…
Despite the astonishing successes of quantum mechanics, due to some fundamental problems such as the measurement problem and quantum arrival time problem, the predictions of the theory are in some cases not quite clear and unique.…
Three problems stand in the way of deriving classical theories from quantum mechanics: those of realist interpretation, of classical properties and of quantum measurement. Recently, we have identified some tacit assumptions that lie at the…
I review the decoherent (or consistent) histories approach to quantum mechanics, due to Griffiths, to Gell-Mann and Hartle, and to Omnes. This is an approach to standard quantum theory specifically designed to apply to genuinely closed…
Motivated by the advances of quantum Darwinism and recognizing the role played by redundancy in identifying the small subset of quantum states with resilience characteristic of objective classical reality, we explore the implications of…
To date, quantum mechanics has proven to be our most successful theoretical model. However, it is still surrounded by a "mysterious halo" that can be summarized in a simple but challenging question: Why quantum phenomena are not understood…
Despite various parallels between quantum states and ordinary information, quantum no-go-theorems have convinced many that there is no realistic framework that might underly quantum theory, no reality that quantum states can represent…
Besides their use for efficient computation, quantum computers are a base for studying quantum systems that create valid physical theories using mathematics and physics. An essential part of the validation process for quantum mechanics is…
The usual formulation of quantum theory is rather abstract. In recent work I have shown that we can, nevertheless, obtain quantum theory from five reasonable axioms. Four of these axioms are obviously consistent with both classical…