A Philosopher's Understanding of Quantum Mechanics: Possibilities and Impossibilities of a Modal Interpretation
Cambridge University Press, 1/28/2000
EAN 9780521651080, ISBN10: 0521651085
Hardcover, 308 pages, 24.4 x 17 x 2 cm
Language: English
This book is about how to understand quantum mechanics by means of a modal interpretation. Modal interpretations provide a general framework within which quantum mechanics can be considered as a theory that describes reality in terms of physical systems possessing definite properties. Quantum mechanics is standardly understood to be a theory about probabilities with which measurements have outcomes. Modal interpretations are relatively new attempts to present quantum mechanics as a theory which, like other physical theories, describes an observer-independent reality. In this book, Pieter Vermaas summarises the results of this work. The book will be of great value to undergraduates, graduate students and researchers in philosophy of science, and physics departments with an interest in learning about modal interpretations of quantum mechanics.
1. Introduction
2. Quantum mechanics
3. Modal interpretations
Part I. Formalism
4. The different versions
5. The full property ascription
6. Joint property ascriptions
7. Discontinuities, instabilities and other bad behaviour
8. Transition probabilities
9. Dynamical autonomy and locality
Part II. Physics
10. The measurement problem
11. The Born rule
Part III. Philosophy
12. Properties, states, measurement outcomes and effective states
13. Holism versus reductionism
14. Possibilities and impossibilities
15. Conclusions.
‘… the strengths of this book are its clear, detailed exposition of the quantum formalism, and the way in which issues of interpretation are related back to this formalism … the book is very mathematical.’ Rachel Wallace Garden, Zentralblatt für Mathematik