Related papers: Consistent histories, quantum truth functionals, a…
Traditional interpretations of quantum theory in terms of wave function collapse are particularly unappealing when considering the universe as a whole, where there is no clean separation between classical observer and quantum system and…
In the consistent histories (CH) approach to quantum theory probabilities are assigned to histories subject to a consistency condition of negligible interference. The approach has the feature that a given physical situation admits multiple…
The theory of decoherent histories is checked for the requirement of statistical independence of subsystems. Strikingly, this is satisfied only when the decoherence functional is diagonal in both its real a n d imaginary parts. In…
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…
The best developed formulation of closed system quantum theory that handles multiple-time statements, is the consistent (or decoherent) histories approach. The most important weaknesses of the approach is that it gives rise to many…
Although quantum coherence is a basic trait of quantum mechanics, the presence of coherences in the quantum description of a certain phenomenon does not rule out the possibility to give an alternative description of the same phenomenon in…
Quantum mechanics provides a statistical description about nature, and thus would be incomplete if its statistical predictions could not be accounted for by some realistic models with hidden variables. There are, however, two powerful…
We illustrate the crucial role played by decoherence (consistency of quantum histories) in extracting consistent quantum probabilities for alternative histories in quantum cosmology. Specifically, within a Wheeler-DeWitt quantization of a…
In the decoherent histories approach to quantum theory, attention focuses on the conditions under which probabilities may be assigned to sets of quantum histories. A variety of conditions have been proposed, but the most important one is…
The quantum mechanics is proved to admit no hidden-variable in 1960s, which means the quantum systems are contextual. Revealing the mathematical structure of quantum mechanics is a significant task. We develop the approach of partial…
Robert Griffiths has recently addressed, within the framework of a 'consistent quantum theory' that he has developed, the issue of whether, as is often claimed, quantum mechanics entails a need for faster-than-light transfers of information…
Since the enlightening proofs of quantum contextuality first established by Kochen and Specker, and also by Bell, various simplified proofs have been constructed to exclude the non-contextual hidden variable theory of our nature at the…
A central result in the foundations of quantum mechanics is the Kochen-Specker theorem. In short, it states that quantum mechanics is in conflict with classical models in which the result of a measurement does not depend on which other…
We discuss the use of histories labelled by a continuous time in the approach to consistent-histories quantum theory in which propositions about the history of the system are represented by projection operators on a Hilbert space. This…
The geometry of decoherence in generalized "consistent histories" quantum theory is explored, revealing properties of the theory that are independent of any particular application of it. It is shown how the decoherence functional of a…
It is shown that the quantum theory can be formulated on homogeneous spaces of generalized coherent states in a manner that accounts for interference, entanglement, and the linearity of dynamics without using the superposition principle.…
In response to a recent rebuttal of [1] presented in [2], we defend the claim that the Consistent Histories formulation of quantum mechanics does not solve the measurement problem. In order to do so, we argue that satisfactory solutions to…
I briefly review the ''decohering histories'' or ''consistent histories'' formulation of quantum theory, due to Griffiths, Omnes, and Gell-Mann and Hartle (and the subject of my graduate work with George Sudarshan). I also sift through the…
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…
Quantum theory is formulated as the uniquely consistent way to manipulate probability amplitudes. The crucial ingredient is a consistency constraint: if the amplitude of a quantum process can be computed in two different ways, the two…