Foundations of Quantum Mechanics and Special Relativity

量子力学和狭义相对论基础

• 批准号: 9722065
• 负责人: N. David Mermin
• 金额: --
• 依托单位: Cornell University
• 依托单位国家: 美国
• 项目类别: Continuing grant
• 财政年份: 1997
• 资助国家: 美国
• 起止时间: 1997-08-01 至 2001-07-31
• 项目状态: 已结题
• 来源: https://www.nsf.gov/awardsearch/showAward?AWD_ID=9722065&HistoricalAwards=false
• 关键词: Foundations; Quantum; Mechanics; Special; Relativity

A setting for quantum mechanics will be sought that avoids the notorious problems that beset the foundations of the subject. Such a formulation would rely on no prior concept of measurement or observer, would describe individual systems and not just ensembles, would make sense for small systems uncoupled to an environment, and would satisfy an appropriate locality condition. Two elementary but insufficiently noticed recent theorems raise the possibility that it may be possible to satisfy all these requirements in an interpretation of quantum mechanics based on the view that the physics of an isolated system is nothing more or less than the study of all the correlations that exist among its subsystems. The goal is to arrive at an elementary, unmysterious, unambiguous, paradox-free, and pedagogically useful interpretive framework for the quantum theory, as a natural language for describing an inherently probabilistic world. In an independent study the origins of certain misconceptions about special relativity held by physicists and/or sociologists will be traced to some lapses in the traditional pedagogical approaches to the subject. Alternative routes to the special theory will be developed that avoid these pitfalls.

我们将寻求一种量子力学的设置，以避免困扰这门学科基础的那些臭名昭著的问题。这样的公式将不依赖于先前的测量或观察者的概念，将描述单个系统而不仅仅是集成系统，将对与环境不耦合的小系统有意义，并且将满足适当的局部性条件。最近有两个基本的但没有引起足够注意的定理提出了这样一种可能性：在对量子力学的解释中，有可能满足所有这些要求，这种解释基于这样一种观点，即孤立系统的物理学无非是对其子系统之间存在的所有相关性的研究。我们的目标是为量子理论提供一个基本的、不神秘的、明确的、无悖论的、在教学上有用的解释框架，作为描述固有概率世界的自然语言。在一项独立研究中，物理学家和/或社会学家对狭义相对论的某些误解的根源将追溯到传统教学方法中的一些失误。特殊理论的替代路线将被开发出来，以避免这些陷阱。