Do we make reality

Philip Ball

Philip Ball

Alyssa Ney

Márton Gömöri, Gábor Hofer‐Szabó

Abstract This essay has two main claims about EPR’s Reality Criterion. First, we claim that the application of the Reality Criterion makes an essential difference between the EPR argument and Einstein’s later arguments against quantum mechanics. We show that while the EPR argument, making use of the Reality Criterion, does derive that certain interpretations of quantum mechanics are incomplete, Einstein’s later arguments, making no use of the Reality Criterion, do not prove incompleteness, but rather point to the inadequacy of the Copenhagen interpretation. We take this fact as an indication that the Reality Criterion is a crucial, indispensable component of the incompleteness argument(s). The second claim is more substantive. We argue that the Reality Criterion is a special case of the Common Cause Principle. Finally, we relate this proposal to Tim Maudlin’s recent assertion that the Reality Criterion is an analytic truth.

Steven E. Kaufman

In this work a very simple model of physical experiential creation is developed and then used to provide a single, consistent, and clear solution to the riddles posed by the phenomena that lie at the heart of quantum physics. By providing a unitary framework for understanding all of these heretofore inexplicable phenomena, this model demonstrates that physical reality is a reality that has to be created in order to be known. What this model also demonstrates is that the way in which physical reality is created is through a specific type of relation that takes place at a level of reality that is more fundamental than the physical level of reality. Understanding that physical reality has to be created in order to be known first makes it possible to recognize the experiential mechanism that produces wave-particle duality. Recognizing that experiential mechanism then makes it possible to identify and define the fundamental limitation that exists in the creation of physical experience that produces quantum uncertainty. Following that, that same experiential mechanism and limitation is then used to explain both the creation and collapse of the wave function, as well as quantum nonlocality. Ultimately, this model of physical experiential creation, by providing a single solution to all of these heretofore insoluble riddles, allows for the unification of classical and quantum physical experiential reality, by demonstrating that the only difference between determinate classical physical reality and indeterminate quantum physical reality lies in the relational conditions under which each of these physical experiential realities is created. What this model also makes clear is that the probability or randomness that is so much a part of quantum theory is not an actual feature of reality, but is only an artifact of the process by which quantum physical reality is created, thereby vindicating Einstein for his never-relinquished view that reality is not fundamentally probabilistic.

Bernard d’Espagnat