Refuting nonlocal realism?

Posting has been light of late. I would like to say this is due to the same sort of absorbtion that JoAnne has described over at Cosmic Variance, but in fact my attention span is currently too short for that and it has more to do with my attempts to work on three projects [...]

What can decoherence do for us?

OK, so it’s time for the promised post about decoherence, but where to begin? Decoherence theory is now a vast subject with an enormous literature covering a wide variety of physical systems and scenarios. I will not deal with everything here, but just make some comments on how the theory looks from my [...]

Steane Roller

Earlier, I promised some discussion of Andrew Steane’s new paper: Context, spactime loops, and the interpretation of quantum mechanics. Whilst it is impossible to summarize everything in the paper, I can give a short description of what I think are the most important points.

Firstly, he does believe that the whole universe obeys the laws [...]

New Papers

I don’t normally like to just list new papers without commenting on them, but I don’t have much reading time at the moment so here are two that look interesting.
Firstly, Andrew Steane has a new paper entitled “Context, spacetime loops, and the interpretation of quantum mechanics”, which was written for the Ghirardi festschrift. Steane [...]

Quantum foundations before WWII

The Shtetl Optimizer informs me that there has not been enough contemplation of Quantum Quandaries for his taste recently. Since there has not been a lot of interesting foundational news, the only sensible thing to do is to employ the usual blogger’s trick of cut, paste, link and plagiarize other blogs for ideas.
Scott recently [...]

Anyone for frequentist fudge?

Having just returned from several evenings of Bayesian discussion in Vaxjo, I was inspired to read Facts, Values and Quanta by Marcus Appleby. Whilst not endorsing a completely subjectivist view of probability, the paper is an appropriate remedy for anyone who thinks that the frequentist view is the way to understand probability in physics, [...]

Shameless self-promotion

As is traditional with physics blogs, it is time to indulge in a spot of shameless self-promotion of my own work. I have just posted a paper on quantum dynamics as an analog of conditional probability on the arXiv. This is about a generalization of the isomorphism between bipartite quantum states and completely [...]

Realists on the counter attack

Martin Daumer, Detlef Duerr, Sheldon Goldstein, Tim Maudlin, Roderich Tumulka and Nino Zanghi, a collection of scholars noted for their advocacy or realist interpretations of quantum mechanics, and Bohmian mechanics in particular, have posted an article on quant-ph that attacks the idea that quantum theory is “fundamentally about information”. The article is a response [...]

Rovellifest 1

Carlo Rovelli has recently put 3 papers on the arXiv, which have attracted some attention within the blogsphere (see here, here, here and here). The one that concerns us here at QQ is the paper about EPR in the relational approach to QM. I don't want to comment on the particular argument in [...]

The Free Will Theorem

Michael Nielsen recently posted a comment by John Sidles about a preprint by Kochen and Conway that was posted on the quant-ph arXiv yesterday. It's called "The Free Will Theorem", which is certainly a provocative title. Here's my comment on the paper that I left on Mike's blog.
Hmm… I had a look at [...]