The Foundations of Quantum Mechanics: Historical Analysis and Open Questions : Lecce, Italy, 13-16 October 1998

Front Cover
World Scientific, 2000 - 418 pages
This volume provides a sample of the present research on the foundations of quantum mechanics and related topics by collecting the papers of the Italian scholars who attended the conference entitled ?The Foundations of Quantum Mechanics ? Historical Analysis and Open Questions? (Lecce, 1998). The perspective of the book is interdisciplinary, and hence philosophical, historical and technical papers are gathered together so as to allow the reader to compare different viewpoints and cultural approaches. Most of the papers confront, directly or indirectly, the objectivity problem, taking into account the positions of the founders of QM or more recent developments. More specifically, the technical papers in the book pay special attention to the interpretation of the experiments on Bell's inequalities and to decoherence theory, but topics on unsharp QM, the consistent-history approach, quantum probability and alternative theories are also discussed. Furthermore, a number of historical and philosophical papers are devoted to Planck's, Weyl's and Pauli's thought, but topics such as quantum ontology, predictivity of quantum laws, etc., are treated.
 

Contents

Introduction
1
Kaons and Bells Inequality
19
The Real and the Possible 133
73
On the Decoherence of a Free Semiclassical Positronium
99
Quantum Mechanics without Waves
127
A Controversial Role for Correspondence in Theoretical Physics
151
Which Kind of Mathematics for Quantum Mechanics? The Relevance
167
Natural Kinds and Concepts of Physics
185
Pauli Jung and A New Historical
251
Objective Quantum Description of Macroscopic System
267
Some Remarks on Knowledge and Probability Arising from
281
Hermann Weyls Phenomenological Contribution to Quantum Physics
295
A Criterion to Assign Probabilities to Quantum Histories
319
The Search for Universal Constants and the Birth of Quantum Mechanics
343
Information and State Correlations from Classical to Quantum
369
Physical Meaning of Bell Type Inequalities
393

Is Quantum Mechanics Contextual?
207
An Independent Axiomatization of Quantum MV Algebras
233
Time Scale and Completely Positive Dynamical Evolutions
407
Copyright

Other editions - View all

Common terms and phrases

Bibliographic information