Philosophy of Quantum Mechanics

Abstract

If the philosophy of physics has a central problem, it is the quantum measurement problem: the problem of how to interpret, make sense of, and perhaps even fix quantum mechanics. Other theories in physics challenge people’s intuitions and everyday assumptions, but only quantum theory forces people to take seriously the idea that there is no objective world at all beyond their observations—or, perhaps, that there are many. Other theories in physics leave people puzzled about aspects of how they are to be understood, but only quantum theory raises paradoxes so severe that leading physicists and leading philosophers of physics seriously consider tearing it down and rebuilding it anew. Quantum theory is both the conceptual and mathematical core of 21st-century physics and the gaping void in the attempt to understand the worldview given by 21st-century physics. Unsurprisingly, then, the philosophy of quantum mechanics is dominated by the quantum measurement problem, and to a lesser extent by the related problem of quantum non-locality, and in this article, an introduction to each is given. In Section 1, I review the formalism of quantum mechanics and the quantum measurement problem. In Sections 2–4 I discuss the three main classes of solution to the measurement problem: treat the formalism as representing the objective state of the system; treat it as representing only probabilities of something else; modify it or replace it entirely. In Section 5 I review Bell’s inequality and the issue of non-locality in quantum mechanics, and relate it to the interpretations discussed in Sections 2–4. I make some brief concluding remarks in Section 6. A note on terminology: I use “quantum theory” and “quantum mechanics” interchangeably to refer to the overall framework of quantum physics (containing quantum theories as simple as the qubit or harmonic oscillator and as complicated as the Standard Model of particle physics). I do not adopt the older convention (still somewhat common in philosophy of physics) that “quantum mechanics” means only the quantum theory of particles, or perhaps even non-relativistic particles: when I want to refer to non-relativistic quantum particle mechanics I will do so explicitly.