Szabó, László E. and Gömöri, Márton and Gyenis, Zalán (2025) Questionable and Unquestionable in Quantum Mechanics. [Preprint]
This is the latest version of this item.
![[img]](https://philsci-archive.pitt.edu/style/images/fileicons/text.png) |
Text
Questionable_and_Unquestionable_in_QM-preprint-v2.pdf Download (571kB) |
Abstract
According to the Kolmogorovian Censorship Hypothesis, everything that quantum theory says about the world in the language of the quantum mechanical Hilbert space formalism is actually about relationships between ordinary relative frequencies expressible in operational terms using classical Kolmogorovian probability theory. In other words, a quantum theoretical description of a system should in principle be translatable into a purely operational–probabilistic description. However, our goal in this paper is different; we do not want to deal with the problem how to translate the known theory of quantum mechanics into operational terms, or to reconstruct the theory from postulates which can be interpreted in operational terms. Our aim is somewhat broader and points in the opposite direction. We start with a general scheme for the operational description of an arbitrary physical system. The description is based solely on the notion of observable events (measurement operations and measurement results) and on general, empirically established simple laws concerning their relative frequency. These laws are so simple and fundamental that they apply equally to any physical system—no plausibly conceivable physical system is known that would violate our basic assumptions. In the first part of the paper, we outline the basic elements of such an operational–probabilistic theory; such as the notion of state, the mathematical description of state space, and the basic notions of dynamics. All these notions are expressed in classical terms, within the framework of Kolmogorovian probability theory, and, since our goal is not necessarily to reproduce standard quantum mechanics, we try to avoid making assumptions that are restrictive and would not hold in the most general case. In the second part of the paper, we discuss how this operational–probabilistic description compares to the quantum mechanical description and to what extent the standard Hilbert space quantum mechanics can be regarded as a reformulation of the general operational–probabilistic theory.
| Export/Citation: | EndNote | BibTeX | Dublin Core | ASCII/Text Citation (Chicago) | HTML Citation | OpenURL |
| Social Networking: |
Available Versions of this Item
-
Questionable and Unquestionable in Quantum Mechanics. (deposited 08 Sep 2023 21:09)
- Questionable and Unquestionable in Quantum Mechanics. (deposited 27 Jun 2025 14:25) [Currently Displayed]
Monthly Views for the past 3 years
Monthly Downloads for the past 3 years
Plum Analytics
Actions (login required)
 |
View Item |
![[feed]](http://philsci-archive.pitt.edu/style/images/feed-icon-32x32.png){kind=icon}