PL162 Philosophy of Quantum Mechanics

Philosophy of Physics, Science, and Metaphysics at Brown University

Brown University PL162 Philosophy of Quantum Mechanics, Spring 2007

Links to Papers

Note for Brown students: Some of the links to the papers require that your IP address is seen as being from Brown. You either need to be on campus or use the VPN software that Brown provides. You never need to pay any money for access to articles. For non-Brown readers, for some papers, you will need access through a library that has a subscription to the relevant journal.

Email me with any additional papers you are interested in covering or if you spot any errors.

The schedule listed here is subject to change based on class performance and scheduling contingencies.

Jan 25	Introduction; What is strange about QM, Heisenberg’s Uncertainty Principle, Superposition	Optional Readings: Jan Hilgevoord and Jos Uffink, Uncertainty Principle; Robertson, The Uncertainty Principle;
Jan 30	What is strange about QM, Part 2 Entanglement QM Formalism	Albert, Ch 1 and 2. My Notes, Part 1. Optional Reading: Appendices of Maudlin's Book. There are lots of other sources for learning the formalism behind quantum mechanics. What we will discuss is a much simplified version of what is taught in a physics course, but still captures all the important features.
Feb 1	Class Cancelled
Feb 6	Discussion of Configuration Space and Initial Discussion of the "Reality" of the wave function.	Review My Notes, Part 2, the slides from the previous and material from upcoming classes.
Feb 8	How the QM Formalism explains the funny experimental results we got.
Feb 13	The Measurement Problem Bohr, Heisenberg, Von Neumann, Wheeler, Wigner, Copenhagen interpretation	Albert, Ch. 4 Optional Readings: Jan Faye, Copenhagen Interpretation
Feb 15	Many Worlds Interpretations: Bare Theory, Everett's Relative State Interpretation	Assignment 1 due Friday Feb 16, 4:30 PM Albert, Ch 6; Lev Vaidman, Many Worlds Interpretation Optional Readings: Hugh Everett III, "Relative State" Formulation of Quantum Mechanics; Howard Stein, The Everett Interpretation of Quantum Mechanics: Many Worlds or None?; Robert Geroch, The Everett Interpretation;
Feb 20	Holiday
Feb 22	Many Worlds Interpretations: Probabilities	Optional Readings: David Wallace, Epistemology Quantized; David Papineau, Probabilities and the Many Minds Interpretation of Quantum Mechanics; D Deutsch, Quantum Theory as a Universal Physical Theory
Feb 27	Many Worlds Interpretations: Probabilities
Mar 1	Bohmian Mechanics: particles, pilot wave, Bohm's equation	Albert, Ch 7; Sheldon Goldstein: Bohmian Mechanics, Albert, Bohm's Alternative to Quantum Mechanics Optional Readings: K. Berndl, M. Daumer, D. Dürr, S. Goldstein, N. Zanghi, A Survey on Bohmian Mechanics;
Mar 6	Bohmian Mechanics: conditional wave-functions, effective wave functions, comparison to many-worlds theory.	Harvey Brown and David Wallace, Solving the Measurement Problem: De Broglie--Bohm Loses Out to Everett
Mar 8	Spontaneous Collapse Interpretations: GRW interpretation, detecting collapses, energy conservation	Assignment 2 due Friday March 9, 4:30 PM Albert, Ch 5; Giancarlo Ghirardi, Collapse Theories, Optional Reading: Ghirardi, Rimini, Weber, Unified Dynamics for Microscopic and Macroscopic Systems;
Mar 13	Three Ontologies for Spontaneous Collapse Interpretations: Mass-Density Field, Flash, Bare Ontology	Valia Allori, Sheldon Goldstein, Roderich Tumulka, Nino Zanghi, On the Common Structure of Bohmian Mechanics and the Ghirardi-Rimini-Weber Theory
Mar 15	Mid-term Exam
Mar 20	Quantum Non-locality, Bell’s Theorem	Albert Ch. 3; Maudlin, Chapter 1 and 2; Alain Aspect, Bell's Inequality Test: More Ideal than Ever
Mar 22	Special Relativity (STR), Minkowski spacetime, Invariant Interval, Time and Space in STR, Length Contraction, Time Dilation, Rigidity	Maudlin, Ch 2; My Notes on Relativity
	Spring Break
Apr 3	Superluminal Particles	Maudlin, Ch 3
Apr 5	Cancelled Class
Apr 10	Signaling	Maudlin, Ch 4 Assignment 3 due Wednesday April 11, 4:30 PM
Apr 12	EPR	A. Einstein, B. Podolsky, and N. Rosen, Can Quantum-Mechanical Description of Physical Reality Be Considered Complete?; Bohr's Reply; Maudlin, Chapter 5 (EPR part)
Apr 17	EPR	John Bell, Bertlmann's Socks and the Nature of Reality Optional Reading: John Bell, On the Problem of Hidden Variables in Quantum Mechanics; N. David Mermin, Hidden variables and the two theorems of John Bell;
Apr 19	Non-local Causation	Maudlin, Ch 5 (non-EPR part)
Apr 24	General Relativity, Radical Hypersurface Dependence, and the Narrativity Problem	Maudlin, Ch 8 and 9; Brown Appendix B
Apr 26	Bell's 'Relative Time Invariance' and how it applies to GRW-mass-density, GRW-flash, and Bohmian mechanics.	Maudlin, "Nonlocal Correlations in Quantum Theory: How the Trick Might Be Done"
May 1	Relativistic GRW-flash theory	Assignment 4 due, 4:30 Tuesday May 1 Optional Reading: Roderich Tumulka, On Spontaneous Wave Function Collapse and Quantum Field Theory
May 11	Final Exam (9AM, Wilson Hall 101)

Information-Theoretic Approaches

Louis Marchildon: Why Should We Interpret Quantum Mechanics? (Potentially misleading title--its focus is on interpretations where collapse is epistemic, but there are no extra physical variables)