Abstract Present quantum mechanics has been a source of puzzlement since its inception in 1927. The theory has been undoubtedly successful predicting results in a large number of experimental situations. However, its heavy epistemological legacy, coming from the initial ideas of Niels Bohr about complementarity and about the possibility for physical description, has turned quantum mechanics in a kind of ontological black box. This work is an attempt to overcome such epistemological opacity, proposing an interpretation that will present Bohrian quantum mechanics formalism and the pilot-wave framework as two complementary and mutually non-exclusive theoretical descriptions of quantum phenomena. The two theories will, hopefully, become the foundations of a new and more complete approach to quantum reality. One that will, simultaneously, serve as a highly efficient predictive formalism and also as an intelligible description about quantum phenomena in four-dimensional spacetime. I will start from the pilot-wave framework, proposing that quantum waves are memory carrying structures that encode probabilistic distributions of the fundamental behaviors of corpuscles. This nomological information, as I will call it, will have a necessitarian weight upon all corpuscles behaviors, in the sense that the only behaviors allowed in Nature are the ones that can be encoded or have been encoded in the quantum wave carriers. Such a picture of quantum physics will imply that corpuscles exchange nomological information with the carrier waves, by means of the guidage or pilot-wave effect. Secondly, I will suggest that the actual Bohrian quantum mechanics formalism, the one used in the Copenhagen School interpretation, describes not the actual states and properties of quantum corpuscular entities, but the nomological information about those states and properties. As such Bohrian quantum mechanics is a description about not the actual physical observable dynamics, but about the dynamics of the nomological information encoded in the carrier quantum waves. The adoption and consistent interplay of both theoretical descriptions, pilot-wave mode and Bohrian mode, will serve epistemological completeness in the study of quantum phenomena.

Boston studies in the philosophy of scienceJan 1, 20240 citations

Comment on "There is No Quantum World" by Jeffrey Bub

Philippe Grangier

In a recent preprint [1] Jeffrey Bub presents a discussion of neo-Bohrian interpretations of quantum mechanics, and also of von Neumann's work on infinite tensor products [2]. He rightfully writes that this work provides a theoretical framework that deflates the measurement problem and justifies Bohr's insistence on the primacy of classical concepts. But then he rejects these ideas, on the basis that the infinity limit is "never reached for any real system composed of a finite number of elementary systems". In this note we present opposite views on two major points: first, admitting mathematical infinities in a physical theory is not a problem, if properly done; second, the critics of [3,4,5] comes with a major misunderstanding of these papers: they don't ask about "the significance of the transition from classical to quantum mechanics", but they start from a physical ontology where classical and quantum physics need each other from the beginning. This is because they postulate that a microscopic physical object (or degree of freedom) always appears as a quantum system, within a classical context. Here we argue why this (neo-Bohrian) position makes sense.

quant-pharXiv:2512.22965Dec 30, 20250 citations