The well-known limitations on the field of the quantum mechanical vector space, which, within the framework of the propositional logic of Birkhoff and von Neumann, can be obtained only for systems of dimension greater than or equal to four, are obtained here for all dimensions. The propositional logic fails to provide any information about the quantum systems of dimension less than four and, moreover, one does not know the empirical meaning of one of its basic assumptions. The Jordan algebra approach, on the other hand, which provides the same limitations on the field, also suffers from anomalies in low dimensions and is altogether formal rather than physical. In the present work, which is based on a recent study of the topological properties of quantum states, there are no low-dimensional anomalies and the assumptions have clear empirical meaning.
The well-known limitations on the field of the quantum mechanical vector space, which, within the framework of the propositional logic of Birkhoff and von Neumann, can be obtained only for systems of dimension greater than or equal to four, are obtained here for all dimensions. The propositional logic fails to provide any information about the quantum systems of dimension less than four and, moreover, one does not know the empirical meaning of one of its basic assumptions. The Jordan algebra approach, on the other hand, which provides the same limitations on the field, also suffers from anomalies in low dimensions and is altogether formal rather than physical. In the present work, which is based on a recent study of the topological properties of quantum states, there are no low-dimensional anomalies and the assumptions have clear empirical meaning.
We show how a fundamental assumption in the Dirac formulation of quantum mechanics, namely that the states of a physical system at a particular time are mathematically represented by unit vectors in Hilbert space, can be deduced from certain aspects of our experimental procedures and of the observed outcome of quantum mechanical experiments. Our assumptions have clear empirical meaning and the results hold true for any dimensionality of the system, without anomalies in low dimensions which exist in the two well-known axiomatic approaches to quantum mechanics. The propositional logic approach of Birkhoff and von Neumann does not work for quantum systems of dimension less than four and requires an assumption which does not have an empirical basis. Jordan algebra axioms, on the other hand, also lead to anomalies in low dimensions and, moreover, are formal and cannot be directly physically interpreted. In our work it was possible to avoid these shortcomings.
. We put forward a new take on the logic of quantum mechanics, following Schrödinger's point of view that it is composition which makes quantum theory what it is, rather than its particular propositional structure due to the existence of superpositions, as proposed by Birkhoff and von Neumann. This gives rise to an intrinsically quantitative kind of logic, which truly deserves the name ‘logic’ in that it also models meaning in natural language, the latter being the origin of logic, that it supports automation, the most prominent practical use of logic, and that it supports probabilistic inference. The physics and the logic of quantum-ish logic. In 1932 John von Neumann formalized Quantum Mechanics in his book “Mathematische Grundlagen der Quantenmechanik”. This was effectively the official birth of the quantum mechanical formalism which until now, some 75 years later, has remained the same. Quantum theory underpins so many things in our daily lives including chemical industry, energy production and information technology, which arguably makes it the most technologically successful theory of physics ever. However, in 1935, merely three years after the birth of his brainchild, von Neumann wrote in a letter to American mathematician Garrett Birkhoff: “I would like to make a confession which may seem immoral: I do not believe absolutely in Hilbert space no more.” (sic)—for more details see [73]. Soon thereafter they published a paper entitled “The Logic of Quantum Mechanics” [13]. Their ‘quantum logic’ was cast in order-theoretic terms, very much in the spirit of the then reigning algebraic view of logic, with the distributive law being replaced with a weaker (ortho)modular law. This resulted in a research community of quantum logicians [68, 71, 47, 30]. However, despite von Neumann's reputation, and the large body of research that has been produced in the area, one does not find a trace of this activity neither in the mainstream physics, mathematics, nor logic literature. Hence, 75 years later one may want to conclude that this activity was a failure. What went wrong? The mathematics of it. Let us consider the raison d'être for the Hilbert space formalism.
Quantum mechanics is usually described in the terminology of probability theory even though the properties of the probability spaces associated with it are fundamentally different from the standard ones of probability theory. For example, Kolmogorov's axioms are not general enough to encompass the non-commutative situations that arise in quantum theory. There have been many attempts to generalise these axioms to meet the needs of quantum mechanics. The focus of these attempts has been the observation, first made by Birkhoff and von Neumann (1936), that the propositions associated with a quantum-mechanical system do not form a Boolean σ-algebra. There is almost universal agreement that the probability space associated with a quantum-mechanical system is given by the set of subspaces of a separable Hilbert space, but there is disagreement over the algebraic structure that this set represents. In the most popular model for the probability space of quantum mechanics the propositions are assumed to form an orthocomplemented lattice (Mackey (1963), Jauch (1968)). The fundamental concept here is that of a partial order, that is a binary relation that is reflexive and transitive but not symmetric. The partial order is interpreted as embodying the logical concept of implication in the set of propositions associated with the physical system. Although this model provides an acceptable mathematical expression of the probabilistic structure of quantum mechanics in that the subspaces of a separable Hilbert space give a representation of an ortho-complemented lattice, it has several deficiencies which will be discussed later.
As has already been pointed out by Birkhoff and von Neumann, quantum logic can be formulated in terms of projective geometry. In three-dimensional Hilbert space, elementary logical propositions are associated with one-dimensional subspaces, corresponding to points of the projective plane. It is shown that, starting with three such propositions corresponding to some basis {u,v,w}, successive application of the binary logical operation (x,y)⟼(x∨y)⊥ generates a set of elementary propositions which is countable infinite and dense in the projective plane if and only if no vector of the basis {u,v,w} is orthogonal to the other ones.
I discuss a set of strong, but probabilistically intelligible, axioms from which one can {\em almost} derive the appratus of finite dimensional quantum theory. Stated informally, these require that systems appear completely classical as restricted to a single measurement, that different measurements, and likewise different pure states, be equivalent (up to the action of a compact group of symmetries), and that every state be the marginal of a bipartite non-signaling state perfectly correlating two measurements. This much yields a mathematical representation of measurements and states that is already very suggestive of quantum mechanics. In particular, in any theory satisfying these axioms, measurements can be represented by orthonormal subsets of, and states, by vectors in, an ordered real Hilbert space -- in the quantum case, the space of Hermitian operators, with its usual tracial inner product. One final postulate (a simple minimization principle, still in need of a clear interpretation) forces the positive cone of this space to be homogeneous and self-dual and hence, to be the the state space of a formally real Jordan algebra. From here, the route to the standard framework of finite-dimensional quantum mechanics is quite short.