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Register a new userBeyond method: The diatribe between Feyerabend and Popper over the foundations of quantum mechanics
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Flavio Del Santo
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Karl Popper and Paul Feyerabend have been among the most influential philosophers of science of the twentieth century. Extensive studies have been dedicated to the development of their controversial relationship, which saw Feyerabend turning from a student and supporter of Popper to one of his harshest critics. Yet, it is not as well known that the rift between Popper and Feyerabend generated mainly in the context of their studies on the foundation of quantum mechanics, which has been the main subject of their discussions for about two decades. This paper reconstructs in detail their diatribe over the foundations of quantum mechanics, emphasizing also the major role that their personal relationship played in their distancing.
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The goal of this paper is to explain how the views of Albert Einstein, John Bell and others, about nonlocality and the conceptual issues raised by quantum mechanics, have been rather systematically misunderstood by the majority of physicists.
Understanding the quantum measurement problem is closely associated with understanding wave function collapse. Motivated by Breuers claim that it is impossible for an observer to distinguish all states of a system in which it is contained, wave function collapse is tied to self observation in the Schmidt biorthonormal decomposition of entangled systems. This approach provides quantum mechanics in general and relational quantum mechanics in particular with a clean, well motivated explanation of the measurement process and wave function collapse.
A modified version of relational quantum mechanics is developed based on the three following ideas. An observer can develop an internally consistent description of the universe but it will, of necessity, differ in particulars from the description developed by any other observer. The state vector is epistomological and relative to a given quantum system as in the original relational quantum mechanics. If two quantum systems are entangled, they will observe themselves to be in just one of the many states in the Schmidt biorthonormal decomposition and not in a linear combination of many.
We show that quantum mechanics is the first theory in human history that violates the basic a priori principles that have shaped human thought since immemorial times. Therefore although it is more contrary to magic than any body of knowledge could be, what could be called its magic precisely resides in this violation.
Boltzmanns ergodic hypothesis furnishes a possible explanation for the emergence of statistical mechanics in the framework of classical physics. In quantum mechanics, the Eigenstate Thermalization Hypothesis (ETH) is instead generally considered as a possible route to thermalization. This is because the notion of ergodicity itself is vague in the quantum world and it is often simply taken as a synonym for thermalization. Here we show, in an elementary way, that when quantum ergodicity is properly defined, it is, in fact, equivalent to ETH. In turn, ergodicity is equivalent to thermalization, thus implying the equivalence of thermalization and ETH. This result previously appeared in [De Palma et al., Phys. Rev. Lett. 115, 220401 (2015)], but becomes particularly clear in the present context. We also show that it is possible to define a classical analogue of ETH which is implicitly assumed to be satisfied when constructing classical statistical mechanics. Classical and quantum statistical mechanics are built according to the familiar standard prescription. This prescription, however, is ontologically justified only in the quantum world.
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