Quantum Mechanics and Real Events

U O Egbai

In 1935, Einstein, Podolsky, and Rosen published their thought experiment I a paper entitled, “Can Quantum – Mechanical Description of Physical Reality be considered complete?”. At that time, Bohr, Heisenberg, and the proponents of the Copenhagen interpretation of Quantum mechanics, were saying that Quantum theory is a complete and the last theory in physics event though it does not provide any picture of the world separate from our observations of it. The message Einstein conveyed to his colleagues was that the quantum theory is not a “complete” theory because it does not describe certain important aspects of reality which are physically real event if they are not observed. In sympathy with Einstein's position, this paper argues that, the real nature of physical reality cannot be explained “at once” by a single theory. Reality is still unfolding and a new theory that will surpass the predictive ability of Quantum Mechanics will soon emerge. SOPHIA: An African Journal of Philosophy Vol. 8 (2) 2006: pp.14-19

Luis de la Peña, Ana Marı́a Cetto

Yousef Ghazi-Tabatabai, Petros Wallden

Sorkin has introduced a new, observer independent, interpretation of quantum mechanics that can give a successful realist account of the ‘quantum micro-world’ as well as explaining how classicality emerges at the level of observable events for a range of systems including single time ‘Copenhagen measurements’. This ‘co-event interpretation’ presents us with a new ontology, in which a single ‘co-event’ is real. A new ontology necessitates a review of the dynamical and predictive mechanism of a theory, and in this paper we begin the process by exploring means of expressing the dynamical and predictive content of histories theories in terms of co-events.

Bryce Seligman DeWitt

Michael Spanner

Starting with a consideration of the implication of Bell inequalities in quantum mechanics, a new quantum postulate is suggested in order to restore classical locality and causality to quantum physics: only the relative coordinates between detected quantum events are valid observables. This postulate supports the EPR view that quantum mechanics is incomplete, while also staying compatible to the Bohr view that nothing exists beyond the quantum. The new postulate follows from a more general principle of quantum relativity, which states that only correlations between experimental detections of quantum events have a real classical existence. Quantum relativity provides a framework to differentiate the quantum and classical world.