Quantum Mechanics as a Complete Physical Theory

Masanori Abe

Kazmer Ujvarosy

Based on a thought experiment the Einstein-Podolsky-Rosen paper’s authors concluded that in quantum mechanics the mathematical objects called wave functions fail to describe the physical reality and consequently quantum theory is incomplete. They left open the question of whether or not a complete description of the physical reality exists, but expressed their belief that such a complete theory is possible. In this paper I show that indeed a theory that gives a complete description of the physical reality exists.

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

David Deutsch

Jeffrey Bub

Claudio Garola, Sandro Sozzo

The old Bohr–Einstein debate about the completeness of quantum mechanics (QM) was held on an ontological ground. The completeness problem becomes more tractable, however, if it is preliminarily discussed from a semantic viewpoint. Indeed every physical theory adopts, explicitly or not, a truth theory for its observative language, in terms of which the notions of semantic objectivity and semantic completeness of the physical theory can be introduced and inquired. In particular, standard QM adopts a verificationist theory of truth that implies its semantic nonobjectivity; moreover, we show in this paper that standard QM is semantically complete, which matches Bohr’s thesis. On the other hand, one of the authors has provided a Semantic Realism (or SR) interpretation of QM that adopts a Tarskian theory of truth as correspondence for the observative language of QM (which was previously mantained to be impossible); according to this interpretation QM is semantically objective, yet incomplete, which matches EPR’s thesis. Thus, standard QM and the SR interpretation of QM come to opposite conclusions. These can be reconciled within an integrationist perspective that interpretes non–Tarskian theories of truth as theories of metalinguistic concepts different from truth.