The question is often asked how to interprete quantum physics. That question does not arise in classical physics, since Newton's axioms are immediately connected with basic ideas and experiences. The same is possible in quantum physics, if we remember how elementary particle physicists describe their experiments. As Helmholtz has pointed out. the basic assumption of classical physics is that of geneidentity. That means: Bodies remain the same during their motion. Obviously, that is no longer true in quantum physics. Particles can be created and annihilated. Therefore creation and annihilation must be considered as basic processes. Motion only occurs, if a particle is annihilated in a certain point, if an equal one is created in an infinitesimally neighbouring point, and if this process is continuously going on during a certain time. Motions of that kind are compatible with the existence of some manifest creation and annihilation processes. If we accept this idea, quantum physics can be derived from first principles. As in classical physics, we know therefore what happens from the very beginning. Thus questions of interpretation become dispensable. A particular mathematical method is used to exhaust continua. The theory is formulated in a finite lattice, whose point density and extension equally go to infinity. All calculations are therefore performed in a finite dimensional Hilbert space. The results are however related to an infinite dimensional one. Earlier calculations may, therefore, be essentially correct, though they must be rejected in theories which are based on manifestly infinite dimensional Hilbert spaces. Here limiting processes do not occur in the state space. They are only admissible for numerical results.
The question is often asked how to interprete quantum physics. That question does not arise in classical physics, since Newton's axioms are immediately connected with basic ideas and experiences. The same is possible in quantum physics, if we remember how elementary particle physicists describe their experiments. As Helmholtz has pointed out. the basic assumption of classical physics is that of geneidentity. That means: Bodies remain the same during their motion. Obviously, that is no longer true in quantum physics. Particles can be created and annihilated. Therefore creation and annihilation must be considered as basic processes. Motion only occurs, if a particle is annihilated in a certain point, if an equal one is created in an infinitesimally neighbouring point, and if this process is continuously going on during a certain time. Motions of that kind are compatible with the existence of some manifest creation and annihilation processes. If we accept this idea, quantum physics can be derived from first principles. As in classical physics, we know therefore what happens from the very beginning. Thus questions of interpretation become dispensable. A particular mathematical method is used to exhaust continua. The theory is formulated in a finite lattice, whose point density and extension equally go to infinity. All calculations are therefore performed in a finite dimensional Hilbert space. The results are however related to an infinite dimensional one. Earlier calculations may, therefore, be essentially correct, though they must be rejected in theories which are based on manifestly infinite dimensional Hilbert spaces. Here limiting processes do not occur in the state space. They are only admissible for numerical results.
The difficulties of the old quantum theory were largely dispelled by the development of quantum mechanics in the 1920s. First Heisenberg (1925) developed the rather abstract matrix mechanics and soon after Schro¨dinger (1926; see also Eckart, 1926) developed the physically more appealing wave mechanics. Subsequently he showed them to be mathematically equivalent. The physicists were greatly relieved; now they had once again a mathematical formalism that enabled the results of experiments to be calculated. It was possible to move forward. It is certainly a very elegant and indeed beautiful formalism, and does enable the results of many physical measurements to be calculated with great accuracy. It is used daily by atomic and nuclear physicists; there is no other way to make calculations. From the earliest days there has been intense debate about the interpretation of quantum mechanics, and it shows no signs of being settled; if anything it is becoming more intense over the years. As Penrose has remarked, no one understands quantum mechanics. Feynman (1967; see also Sykes, 1994) also admitted that ‘nobody understands quantum mechanics’, and Einstein once remarked: ‘I have thought a hundred times as much about the quantum problems as I have about general relativity theory’ (Pais, 1994, p. 57). It should therefore be evident that the most that can be done here is to try to show where the real difficulties lie, and how the failure to recognize that quantum mechanics is an essentially statistical theory has led to a series of confusing quantum paradoxes. It is just these paradoxes that have often been used to support theological speculations. It is useful to ask what ‘understanding quantum mechanics’ actually means. Certainly it means being able to calculate the results of many measurements. The same applies to Newton’s theory of gravitation, which we understand in the sense that we can use it as a basis of calculation, although we do not really understand the gravitational force itself. Very often, especially in modern physics, the mathematical formalism does not give us the sort of intuitive physical feeling for what is going on that we often obtain from classical mechanics. Perhaps we can never achieve more than this for quantum mechanics. In classical mechanics we can assume that a property that is measured objectively exists prior to the interaction of the measuring apparatus with the observed system. Quantum mechanics, however, ‘is incompatible with the proposition that measurement discovers some unknown but pre-existing property’ (Peres, 1997, p. 14). There is an important distinction between mysteries and absurdities. We may be forced to live with mysteries, but there is no reason why we should put up with absurdities such as the wave-particle duality, tunnelling through potential barriers, acausal events and the collapse of the wave function. These are the quantum paradoxes that will be discussed later on. They arise within the Copenhagen interpretation of quantum mechanics and are solved by other interpretations. These alternative interpretations enable us to make conjectures about what is going on, even though we cannot understand it in detail. This is acceptable and a stimulus to further research. It is certainly difficult enough to understand quantum mechanics, but there is no need to try to visualize logical absurdities in the effort to do so. Quantum mechanics is a mathematical formalism that makes it possible to calculate the results of some experiments. Anything more than this, such as questions about the interpretation of what is measured and whether it tells us what is actually going on in the system being studied, belongs to philosophy. Thus we are concerned here with what is essentially a philosophical debate; if it were just a matter of physics the debate would have been settled long ago. One of the difficulties is that it invokes the results of experiments and uses the language of quantum mechanics. Inevitably this language uses philosophical terms and then it is easy to give the impression that the philosophical propositions are in some way entailed by the physical results. These in turn can influence theological thinking. In order to be quite clear which arguments are justified and which are not, it is essential to separate the three levels of discourse: physical, philosophical and theological. Our task is to relate these together, and this immediately raises the traditional problems of the philosophy of science, including the relation of experiment to theory, and of theory to explanation. We begin by discussing experiments, distinguishing between those that are real and those that are imaginary.
Following previous works by E. Prugovečki [Physica A 91A, 202 (1978) and Stochastic Quantum Mechanics and Quantum Space–time (Reidel, Dordrecht, 1986)] on common features of classical and quantum mechanics, we develop a unified mathematical framework for classical and quantum mechanics (based on L2-spaces over classical phase space), in order to investigate to what extent quantum mechanics can be obtained as a simple modification of classical mechanics (on both logical and analytical levels). To obtain this unified framework, we split quantum theory in two parts: (i) general quantum axiomatics (a system is described by a state in a Hilbert space, observables are self-adjoints operators, and so on) and (ii) quantum mechanics proper that specifies the Hilbert space as L2(Rn); the Heisenberg rule [pi,qj]=−iℏδij with p=−iℏ∇, the free Hamiltonian H=−ℏ2Δ/2m and so on. We show that general quantum axiomatics (up to a supplementary “axiom of classicity”) can be used as a nonstandard mathematical ground to formulate physical ideas and equations of ordinary classical statistical mechanics. So, the question of a “true quantization” with “ℏ” must be seen as an independent physical problem not directly related with quantum formalism. At this stage, we show that this nonstandard formulation of classical mechanics exhibits a new kind of operation that has no classical counterpart: this operation is related to the “quantization process,” and we show why quantization physically depends on group theory (the Galilei group). This analytical procedure of quantization replaces the “correspondence principle” (or canonical quantization) and allows us to map classical mechanics into quantum mechanics, giving all operators of quantum dynamics and the Schrödinger equation. The great advantage of this point of view is that quantization is based on concrete physical arguments and not derived from some “pure algebraic rule” (we exhibit also some limit of the correspondence principle). Moreover spins for particles are naturally generated, including an approximation of their interaction with magnetic fields. We also recover by this approach the semi-classical formalism developed by E. Prugovečki [Stochastic Quantum Mechanics and Quantum Space–time (Reidel, Dordrecht, 1986)].
Introduction Quantum mechanics is based on the intuition that the essential difference between atomic physics and classical physics is the occurrence of discontinuities (see in particular [1,4,58–63]). Quantum mechanics should thus be considered a direct continuation of the quantum theory founded by Planck, Einstein and Bohr. Bohr in particular stressed repeatedly, already before the birth of quantum mechanics, that the discontinuities must lead to the introduction of new kinematical and mechanical concepts, so that indeed classical mechanics and its corresponding conceptual scheme should be abandoned [1,4]. Quantum mechanics tries to introduce the new concepts through a precise analysis of what is ‘observable in principle’. In fact, this does not mean setting up the principle that a sharp division between ‘observable’ and ‘unobservable’ quantities is possible and necessary. As soon as a conceptual scheme is given, one can infer from the observations to other facts that are actually not observable directly, and the boundary between ‘observable’ and ‘unobservable’ quantities becomes altogether indeterminate. But if the conceptual scheme itself is still unknown, it will be expedient to enquire only about the observations themselves, without drawing conclusions from them, because otherwise wrong concepts and prejudices taken over from before will block the way to recognising the physical relationships [Zusammenhänge].
Abstract As previously shown, quantum physics for single pairs of creation and annihilation processes may be derived from first principles. Quantum physics at all can be therefore considered as an interplay of such elementary processes. This is easily possible if the number of pairs of processes is finite. Difficulties arise only for infinite numbers. The difficulties are similar to those occurring in the derivation of the equation for an oscillating string from that for an oscillator chain. It is true that the spectra of both systems are not continuously connected. However, a weaker theorem is more important: The chain eigenvalue of each order converges to the string one of the same order for an infinitely growing number of oscillators of a certain kind. Therefore both systems are continuously connected in the sense of semiconvergency. Exhausting the space continuum with a sequence of lattices equably becomming infinitely large and fine, the infinitely dimensional Hilbertspace is steadily connected with the finitely dimensional one in the sense of semiconvergency. It will be shown that the Hilbert spaces in the sequence of lattices yield the suitable tool for quantum physics as an interplay in the mentioned sense. This kind of Hilbert space, the so-called rational one, must be preferred in physics rather than the real one introduced by Hilbert, since all theories in physics are based on a finite number of data. In particular, we formulate Dirac's equation in the rational Hilbert space. It is shown that, even in quantum physics, a theorem of classical physics remains true, according to which relativity results from certain principles formulating most obvious experiences. We obtain the Lorentz invariant Dirac equation mainly from a modification of Newtons definition II according to which p = Hυ/c2 (instead of p = m υ).
A physical picture of macroscopic and microscopic worlds is presented. In the space-time description, both the macroscopic and microscopic worlds are described simultaneously in space-time being a single boundless four dimensional continuum in which the motion of the observer is represented as a world line. In our picture, the space-time description is valid only for the macroscopic world and the microscopic world is local in the sense that it is described in a finite space associated with each point of the macroscopic space-time. In this case, space-time does not exist in the microscopic world in which the observer can not move. For the description of our picture, the language of the non-space-time description is necessary in which space-time is not presupposed. We can utilize the space-time description for the macroscopic world and, at the same time, we have a theory of finite degree of freedom describing creations and annihilations of elementary particles in the microscopic world free from the divergence difficulty, instead of the divergent quantum field theory in the space-time description which is considered in our picture a limit of an approximation like the ideal gas in gas theories. The finite degree of freedom is given by a one-particle state-vector space of a finite dimension from which the second quantization leads to a state-vector space of a countable dimension (a Hilbert space) for the theory of creations and annihilations of elementary particles describing a local microscopic world. The relation between microscopic worlds associated with different macroscopic space-time points is given by a dynamical principle up to a phase factor due to possible fluctuations of phases of local state-vector spaces. The experiment on interference of light performed recently by Franson and Potocki is interpreted in terms of fluctuation of the local phases and is considered to support the theory of finite degree of freedom which leads to the idea of local microscopic worlds.