Topos theory has been suggested first by Isham and Butterfield, and then by Isham and Doering, as an alternative mathematical structure within which to formulate physical theories. In particular, it has been used to reformulate standard quantum mechanics in such a way that a novel type of logic is used to represent propositions. In recent years the topic has been considerably progressing with the introduction of probabilities, group and group transformations. In the present paper we will introduce a candidate for the complex quantity value object and analyse its relation to the real quantity value object. By defining the Grothendieck k-extension of these two objects, so as to turn them into abelian groups, it is possible to define internal one parameter groups in a topos. We then use this new definition to construct the topos analogue of the Stone's theorem.
Topos theory has been suggested first by Isham and Butterfield, and then by Isham and Doering, as an alternative mathematical structure within which to formulate physical theories. In particular, it has been used to reformulate standard quantum mechanics in such a way that a novel type of logic is used to represent propositions. In recent years the topic has been considerably progressing with the introduction of probabilities, group and group transformations. In the present paper we will introduce a candidate for the complex quantity value object and analyse its relation to the real quantity value object. By defining the Grothendieck k-extension of these two objects, so as to turn them into abelian groups, it is possible to define internal one parameter groups in a topos. We then use this new definition to construct the topos analogue of the Stone's theorem.
Topos theory has been suggested first by Isham and Butterfield, and then by Isham and Döring, as an alternative mathematical structure within which to formulate physical theories. In particular, it has been used to reformulate standard quantum mechanics in such a way that a novel type of logic is used to represent propositions. In this paper, we extend this formulation to include the notion of a group and group transformation in such a way that we overcome the problem of twisted presheaves. In order to implement this we need to change the type of topos involved, so as to render the notion of continuity of the group action meaningful.
Topos theory has been suggested first by Isham and Butterfield, and then by Isham and Döring, as an alternative mathematical structure within which to formulate physical theories. In particular it has been used to reformulate standard quantum mechanics in such a way that a novel type of logic is used to represent propositions. In this paper we extend this formulation to include the notion of a group and group transformation in such a way that we overcome the problem of twisted presheaves. In order to implement this we need to change the type of topos involved, so as to render the notion of continuity of the group action meaningful.
This paper is the third in a series whose goal is to develop a fundamentally new way of viewing theories of physics. Our basic contention is that constructing a theory of physics is equivalent to finding a representation in a topos of a certain formal language that is attached to the system. In Paper II, we studied the topos representations of the propositional language PL(S) for the case of quantum theory, and in the present paper we do the same thing for the, more extensive, local language L(S). One of the main achievements is to find a topos representation for self-adjoint operators. This involves showing that, for any physical quantity A, there is an arrow δ̆o(A):Σ̱→R≽̱, where R≽̱ is the quantity-value object for this theory. The construction of δ̆o(Â) is an extension of the daseinisation of projection operators that was discussed in Paper II. The object R≽̱ is a monoid object only in the topos, τϕ=SetsV(H)op, of the theory, and to enhance the applicability of the formalism, we apply to R≽̱ a topos analog of the Grothendieck extension of a monoid to a group. The resulting object, k(R≽̱), is an abelian group object in τϕ. We also discuss another candidate, R↔̱, for the quantity-value object. In this presheaf, both inner and outer daseinisations are used in a symmetric way. Finally, there is a brief discussion of the role of unitary operators in the quantum topos scheme.
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
Σ(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
Σ , and self-adjoint elements of A define continuous functions (more precisely, locale maps) from
Σ to Scott’s interval domain. Noting that open subsets of
Σ(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.
Topos theory has been suggested by Döring and Isham as an alternative mathematical structure with which to formulate physical theories. In particular, it has been used to reformulate standard quantum mechanics in such a way that a novel type of logic is used to represent propositions. In this paper we extend this formulation to include temporally ordered collections of propositions as opposed to single-time propositions. That is to say, we have developed a quantum history formalism in the language of topos theory where truth values can be assigned to temporal propositions. We analyze the extent to which such truth values can be derived from the truth values of the constituent, single-time propositions.