The quantum formalism is a "measurement" formalism--a phenomenological formalism describing certain macroscopic regularities. We argue that it can be regarded, and best be understood, as arising from Bohmian mechanics, which is what emerges from Schr6dinger's equation for a system of particles when we merely insist that "particles " means particles. While distinctly non-Newtonian, Bohmian mechanics is a fully deterministic theory of particles in motion, a motion choreographed by the wave function. We find that a Bohmian universe, though deterministic, evolves in such a manner that an appearance of randomness emerges, precisely as described by the quantum formalism and given, for example, by "p = IV [ 2.,, A crucial ingredient in our analysis of the origin of this randomness is the notion of the effective wave function of a subsystem, a notion of interest in its own right and of relevance to any discussion of quantum theory. When the quantum formalism is regarded as arising in this way, the paradoxes and perplexities so often associated with (nonrelativistic) quantum theory simply evaporate.

this paper a new approach to the problem of constructing a quantum theory of gravity in the cosmological context is proposed. It is founded on results from four separate directions of investigation, which are: 1) A new point of view towards the interpretation problem in quantum cosmology[1, 2, 3, 4], which rejects the idea that a single quantum state, or a single Hilbert space, can provide a complete description of a closed system like the universe. Instead, the idea is to accept Bohr's original proposal that the quantum state requires for its interpretation a context in which we distinguish two subsystems of the universe-the quantum system and observer. However, we seek to relativize this split, so that the boundary between the part of the universe that is considered the system and that which might be considered the observer may be chosen arbitrarily. The idea is then that a quantum theory of cosmology is specified by giving an assignment of a Hilbert space and algebra of observables to every possible boundary that can be considered to split the universe into two such subsystems. A quantum state of the universe is then an assignment of a statistical state to every one of these Hilbert spaces, subject to certain conditions of consistency. Each of these states is interpreted to contain the information that an observer on one side of each boundary might have about the system of the other side. This formulation then accepts the idea that each observer can only have incomplete information about the universe, so that the most complete description possible of the universe is given by the whole collection of incomplete, but mutually compatible quantum state descriptions of all the possible observers. At the same time, the information of different observers is, to some extent, ...

Quantum theory has provoked intense discussions about its interpretation since its pioneer days, beginning with Bohr’s view of quantum theory as a theory of knowledge. We show that such an epistemic perspective can be consistently complemented by Einstein’s ontically oriented position.

Consider the idea of computing functions using experiments with kinematic systems. We prove that for any set A of natural numbers there exists a 2-dimensional kinematic system BA with a single particle P whose observable behaviour decides n ∈ A for all n ∈ N. The system is a bagatelle and can be designed to operate under (a) Newtonian mechanics or (b) Relativistic mechanics. The theorem proves that valid models of mechanical systems can compute all possible functions on discrete data. The proofs show how any information (coded by some A) can be embedded in the structure of a simple kinematic system and retrieved by simple observations of its behaviour. We reflect on this undesirable situation and argue that mechanics must be extended to include a formal theory for performing experiments, which includes the construction of systems. We conjecture that in such an extended mechanics the functions computed by experiments are precisely those computed by algorithms. We set these theorems and ideas in the context of the literature on the general problem “Is physical behaviour computable? ” and state some open problems.

Introduction Despite its extraordinary predictive successes, quantum mechanics has, since its inception some seventy years ago, been plagued by conceptual difficulties. The basic problem, plainly put, is this: It is not at all clear what quantum mechanics is about. What, in fact, does quantum mechanics describe? It might seem, since it is widely agreed that the state of any quantum mechanical system is completely specified by its wave function, that quantum mechanics is fundamentally about the behavior of wave functions. Quite naturally, no physicist wanted this to be true more than did Erwin Schrodinger, the father of the wave function. Nonetheless, Schrodinger ultimately found this impossible to believe. His difficulty was not so much with the novelty of the wave function [2, page 156 of [3]]: "That it is an abstract, unintuitive mathematical construct is a scruple that almost always surfaces against new aids to thought and that carries no great message." Rather, it was that

Contexts are maximal collections of co-measurable observables “bundled together ” to form a “quasi-classical mini-universe. ” Different notions of contexts are discussed for classical, quantum and generalized urn–automaton systems. PACS numbers: 02.10.-v,02.50.Cw,02.10.Ud

A philosophically consistent axiomatic approach to classical and quantum mechanics is given. The approach realizes a strong formal implementation of Bohr's correspondence principle. In all instances, classical and quantum concepts are fully parallel: the same general theory has a classical realization and a quantum realization.

The aim of this paper is to relate algebraic quantum mechanics to topos theory, so as to construct new foundations for quantum logic and quantum spaces. Motivated by Bohr’s idea that the empirical content of quantum physics is accessible only through classical physics, we show how a noncommutative C*-algebra of observables A induces a topos T (A) in which the amalgamation of all of its commutative subalgebras comprises a single commutative C*-algebra A. According to the constructive Gelfand duality theorem of Banaschewski and Mulvey, the latter has an internal spectrum �(A) in T (A), which in our approach plays the role of the quantum phase space of the system. Thus we associate a locale (which is the topos-theoretical notion of a space and which intrinsically carries the intuitionistic logical structure of a Heyting algebra) to a C*-algebra (which is the noncommutative notion of a space). In this setting, states on A become probability measures (more precisely, valuations) on �, and self-adjoint elements of A define continuous functions (more precisely, locale maps) from � to Scott’s interval domain. Noting that open subsets of �(A) correspond to propositions about the system, the pairing map that assigns a (generalized) truth value to a state and a proposition assumes an extremely simple categorical form. Formulated in this way, the quantum theory defined by A is essentially turned into a classical theory, internal to the topos T (A). These results were inspired by the topos-theoretic approach to quantum physics proposed by Butterfield and Isham, as recently generalized by Döring and Isham.

[Heisenberg]... remarks... that even in the case of macroscopic phenomena we may say, in a certain sense, that they are created by repeated observations... [Niels Bohr 1, in 1928 Nature article] I.

Although Bohr’s reply to the EPR argument is supposed to be a watershed moment in the development of his philosophy of quantum theory, it is difficult to find a clear statement of the reply’s philosophical point. Moreover, some have claimed that the point is simply that Bohr is a radical positivist. In this paper, we show that such claims are unfounded. In particular, we give a mathematically rigorous reconstruction of Bohr’s reply to the original EPR argument that clarifies its logical structure, and which shows that it does not rest on questionable philosophical assumptions. Rather, Bohr’s reply is dictated by his commitment to provide “classical ” and “objective ” descriptions of experimental phenomena. 1