Is Quantum Mechanics a Complete Theory?

F. Selleri

D. I. Blokhint︠s︡ev

Masanori Abe

D. A. Slavnov

Claudio Garola, Sandro Sozzo

The old Bohr–Einstein debate about the completeness of quantum mechanics (QM) was held on an ontological ground. The completeness problem becomes more tractable, however, if it is preliminarily discussed from a semantic viewpoint. Indeed every physical theory adopts, explicitly or not, a truth theory for its observative language, in terms of which the notions of semantic objectivity and semantic completeness of the physical theory can be introduced and inquired. In particular, standard QM adopts a verificationist theory of truth that implies its semantic nonobjectivity; moreover, we show in this paper that standard QM is semantically complete, which matches Bohr’s thesis. On the other hand, one of the authors has provided a Semantic Realism (or SR) interpretation of QM that adopts a Tarskian theory of truth as correspondence for the observative language of QM (which was previously mantained to be impossible); according to this interpretation QM is semantically objective, yet incomplete, which matches EPR’s thesis. Thus, standard QM and the SR interpretation of QM come to opposite conclusions. These can be reconciled within an integrationist perspective that interpretes non–Tarskian theories of truth as theories of metalinguistic concepts different from truth.

Zeng‐Bing Chen

Quantum mechanics is a cornerstone of our current understanding of nature and extremely successful in describing physics covering a huge range of scales. However, its interpretation remains controversial since the early days of quantum mechanics. What does a quantum state really mean? Is there any way out of the so-called quantum measurement problem? Here, we present an information-complete quantum theory (ICQT) and the trinary property of nature to beat the above problems. We assume that a quantum system’s state provides an information-complete description of the system in the trinary picture. We present a consistent formalism of quantum theory that makes the information-completeness explicitly and argue that conventional quantum mechanics is an approximation of the ICQT. We then show how our ICQT provides a coherent picture and fresh angle of some existing problems in physics. The computational content of our theory is uncovered by defining an information-complete quantum computer.