Description of many physical entities without the paradoxes encountered in quantum mechanics

Dirk Aerts

Diederik Aerts

Enkhamgalan Nasanjargal

For nearly a century, the standard formulation of quantum mechanics has relied upon the probabilistic interpretation of physical states, fundamentally utilizing the wavefunction () to describe the position, momentum, and state of sub-atomic entities as a distribution of statistical likelihoods. The Copenhagen interpretation, which posits that physical systems do not possess definite properties prior to measurement, has served as the operational foundation of modern quantum physics. However, this stochastic abstraction has persistently generated profound epistemological and physical paradoxes, most notably the unresolved nature of wavefunction collapse and the mathematical friction encountered when attempting to unify quantum mechanics with the deterministic, continuous manifold of general relativity.

Bob Coecke, Bart D’Hooghe, Frank Valckenborgh

Diederik Aerts

The classical concept of 'physical entity', be it particle, wave, fleld or system, has become a problematic concept since the advent of relativity theory and quantum mechanics. The recent developments in modern quantum mechanics, with the performance of delicate and precise experiments involving single quantum entities, manifesting explicit non-local behavior for these entities, brings essential new information about the nature of the concept of entity. Such fundamental categories as space and time are put into question, and only a recourse to more axiomatic descriptions seems possible. In this contribution we want to put forward a 'picture' of what an 'entity' might be, taking into account these recent experimental and theoretical results, and using fundamental results of the axiomatic physical theories (describing classical as well as quantum entities) such as they have been developed during the last decade. We call our approach the 'creation-discovery view' because it considers measurements as physical interactions that in general entail two aspects: (1) a discovery of an already existing reality and (2) a creation of new aspects of reality during the act of measurement. We analyze the paradoxes of orthodox quantum mechanics in this creation-discovery view and point out the pre-scientiflc preconceptions that are contained in the well-known orthodox interpretations of quantum mechanics. Finally we identify orthodox quantum mechanics as a flrst order non classical theory, and explain in this way why it is so successful in its numerical predictions