On the Origin of Probabilities in Quantum Mechanics: Creative and Contextual Aspects

Abstract

At the beginning of this century, a lot of changes as well in the field of politics, art and sciences have led to a change of paradigms and ways in which people think and interact ‘(the/their) world’. That climate of change lasted the whole century, due to the inertia of old ideas and the required time people needed to build ‘new images’ (or even, new world views) that incorporate the new findings. Nonetheless, as soon as old paradigms get overruled, new ones appear. This is something which also happened after the ‘invention’ of quantum physics. The modernist deterministic world guided by Laplace’s prime intelligence had to make place for one in which appear probabilities that have a mysterious status, as we will explain now. The probabilities of classical statistical theories [1, 3], e.g., statistical, mechanics, thermodynamics, classical probability calculus, have never been considered to be an obscure subject, because they can be explained as being due to a lack of knowledge about an eventual deterministic underlying reality. So, these classical probabilities are only a mathematical formalization of the lack of knowledge about the system under study. When quantum mechanics was born as an intrinsic probabilistic theory, the question was raised rapidly of whether these quantum probabilities [5, 10, 13, 17] can also be explained as due to a lack of knowledge. The field of research investigating this problem was referred to as the search for hidden variable theories, the hidden variables describing this so called deterministic underlying reality. During the years many theorems (e.g., the famous no-go theorem of J. von Neumann [4], or its elaborations [6, 7, 8].) have shown that hidden variable theories for quantum mechanics are impossible, indicating that quantum probabilities are of a fundamentally different nature than classical probabilities and seemingly not due to a lack of knowledge. Some physicists formulated very clearly their opinion: quantum mechanical probabilities are ontologically present in reality itself. These ontological (or objective) probabilities destroyed the classical picture of the world in such a way that the search for an image of what really happens in the ‘physical world’ had been abandoned, and still is so in many fields of micro-physics. As such, a large quantity of the contemporary community of physicists consider ‘real’ physics as something definitely complementary to anything to be understood as possibly eligible by ‘realism’. Without going into any debate on this, we will show that it is indeed possible to find a picture of quantum entities where these ‘strange’ probabilities are explained. In fact, even formally, we only have to introduce a specific new concept within the theory of physics, that was not explicitly present before, namely a model of aspects of creation.