Related papers: Decoherent Histories and Realism
I give a pedagogical overview of decoherence and its role in providing a dynamical account of the quantum-to-classical transition. The formalism and concepts of decoherence theory are reviewed, followed by a survey of master equations and…
It is shown how all the major conceptual difficulties of standard (textbook) quantum mechanics, including the two measurement problems and the (supposed) nonlocality that conflicts with special relativity, are resolved in the consistent or…
Decoherence is widely felt to have something to do with the quantum measurement problem, but getting clear on just what is made difficult by the fact that the "measurement problem", as traditionally presented in foundational and…
A direct classical analog of quantum decoherence is introduced. Similarities and differences between decoherence dynamics examined quantum mechanically and classically are exposed via a second-order perturbative treatment and via a strong…
Formulations of quantum mechanics can be characterized as realistic, operationalist, or a combination of the two. In this paper a realistic theory is defined as describing a closed system entirely by means of entities and concepts…
It was pointed out recently [A. Kent, Phys. Rev. Lett. 78 (1997) 2874] that the consistent histories approach allows contrary inferences to be made from the same data. These inferences correspond to projections $P$ and $Q$, belonging to…
Quantum measure theory can be introduced as a histories based reformulation (and generalisation) of Copenhagen quantum mechanics in the image of classical stochastic theories. These classical models lend themselves to a simple…
Interpretational questions that arise in the Consistent Histories formulation of quantum mechanics are illustrated by the familiar example of a beam passing through multiple slits.
The origin of the phenomenological deterministic laws that approximately govern the quasiclassical domain of familiar experience is considered in the context of the quantum mechanics of closed systems such as the universe as a whole. We…
We investigate whether quantum history theories can be consistent with Bayesian reasoning and whether such an analysis helps clarify the interpretation of such theories. First, we summarise and extend recent work categorising two different…
Quantum mechanics is a fundamentally probabilistic theory (at least so far as the empirical predictions are concerned). It follows that, if one wants to properly understand quantum mechanics, it is essential to clearly understand the…
A recently introduced discrete formalism allows to solve the problem of time in quantum gravity in a relational manner. Quantum mechanics formulated with a relational time is not exactly unitary and implies a fundamental mechanism for…
After the development of a self-consistent quantum formalism nearly a century ago there began a quest for how to interpret the theoretical constructs of the formalism. In fact, the pursuit of new interpretations of quantum mechanics…
We begin by discussing ``What exists?'', i.e. ontology, in Classical Physics which provided a description of physical phenomena at the macroscopic level. The microworld however necessitates a introduction of Quantum ideas for its…
We examine the relationship between the decoherence of quantum-mechanical histories of a closed system (as discussed by Gell-Mann and Hartle) and environmentally-induced diagonalization of the density operator for an open system. We study a…
According to scientific realism, science gives us an approximately true description of what the world is like. But what does it mean? In this chapter, we focus on the ontological and metaphysical aspects of this discussion. That is, we are…
This course aims to introduce the student to random matrix models for decoherence and fidelity decay. They present a very powerful alternate approach, that emphasizes the disordered character of many environments and uncontrollable…
Dualities in physics have challenged traditional forms of scientific realism by undermining the idea that theories describe a unique underlying ontology. In this paper, we develop a new perspective on scientific realism that responds to…
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…
We present critical arguments against individual interpretation of Bohr's complementarity and Heisenberg's uncertainty principles. Statistical interpretation of these principles is discussed in the contextual framework. We support the…