Physics Bulletin

Superposition and Interaction

A. J. Leggett

Published Oct 1, 1981• 7 citations

Abstract

Richard Schlegel 1981 London: University of Chicago Press viii + 302 pp price £13.50 This is not a textbook but a fairly ambitious attempt to reinterpret part of the foundations of special relativity and quantum mechanics, with some comments on the implications of this for more general philosophical issues. The two main innovations are: (a) the ‘interaction hypothesis’ – moving clocks do not physically run slow, but the well-known time dilation effects observed in (e.g.) muon decay are due to the interaction of the decay products with measuring instruments moving with respect to them; (b) the ‘restricted superposition hypothesis’ – only those states can enter a quantum-mechanical superposition that are related by a certain restricted set of symmetry operations.

DOI: 10.1088/0031-9112/32/10/028

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