Interpreting the Quantum World [Paperback]

Philosophy of physics title by highly regarded author, fully revised for this paperback edition.Quantum mechanics is plagued by a number of conceptual puzzles, the most well-known of which is perhaps the unfortunate situation of Schrödinger's cat, which turns out to be neither dead nor alive under certain circumstances. This book develops a new proposal for resolving these puzzles, and includes an up-to-date treatment of nonlocality, Bohm's theory, the modal interpretation, and 'decoherence' theories of measurement SH all currently 'hot'topics in this area. The discussion is self-contained and organized so that technical portions may be skipped without losing the thread of the argument.Quantum mechanics is plagued by a number of conceptual puzzles, the most well-known of which is perhaps the unfortunate situation of Schrödinger's cat, which turns out to be neither dead nor alive under certain circumstances. This book develops a new proposal for resolving these puzzles, and includes an up-to-date treatment of nonlocality, Bohm's theory, the modal interpretation, and 'decoherence' theories of measurement SH all currently 'hot'topics in this area. The discussion is self-contained and organized so that technical portions may be skipped without losing the thread of the argument.This is a book about the interpretation of quantum mechanics, in particular how to resolve the measurement problem introduced by the orthodox interpretation of the theory. The heart of the book is a new result that shows how to construct all possible no collapse interpretations, subject to certain natural constraints and the limitations imposed by the hidden variable theorems. From this perspective one sees precisely where things have gone awry and what the options are. Various interpretations, including Bohm's causal interpretation, Bohr's complementarity interpretation, and the modal interpretation are shown to be special cases of this result, for different choices of a lã$