Mathematical Foundation of Quantum Mechanics

Quantum physics for mathematical formulations of universe at small scale (Physics at microscopic level)

Quantum Structures and the Nature of Reality is a collection of papers written for an interdisciplinary audience about the quantum structure research within the International Quantum Structures Association. The advent of quantum mechanics has changed our scientific worldview in a fundamental way. Many popular and semi-popular books have been published about the paradoxical aspects of quantum mechanics. Usually, however, these reflections find their origin in the standard views on quantum mechanics, most of all the wave-particle duality picture. Contrary to relativity theory, where the meaning of its revolutionary ideas was linked from the start with deep structural changes in the geometrical nature of our world, the deep structural changes about the nature of our reality that are indicated by quantum mechanics cannot be traced within the standard formulation. The study of the structure of quantum theory, its logical content, its axiomatic foundation, has been motivated primarily by the search for their structural changes. Due to the high mathematical sophistication of this quantum structure research, no books have been published which try to explain the recent results for an interdisciplinary audience. This book tries to fill this gap by collecting contributions from some of the main researchers in the field. They reveal the steps that have been taken towards a deeper structural understanding of quantum theory.

The lectures here reported were first delivered in August and September, 1965, for the Department of Mechanical and Aerospace Engi­ neering at syracuse University, New York under the sponsorship of the New York State Science and Technology Foundation. Lectures 1-6 and 22-23 are revised from a version prepared by Professor Kin N. Tong on the basis of a transcription of the lectures, kindly provided by Professor S. Eskinazi. The remainder of th~ text has been written out afresh from my own notes. Much of the same ground was covered in my lectures to the Austra lian Mathematical Society's Summer Research Institute at Melbourne in January and February, 1966, and for the parts affected the text conforms to this latter presentation. I am grateful to Professors C.-C. Wang and K. N. Tong for criticism of the manuscript. These lectures constitute a course, not a treatise. Names are attached to theorems justly, to the best of my knowledge, but are not intended to replace a history of the subject or references to the sources.

As a graduate student working in quantum optics I encountered the question that might be taken as the theme of this book. The question definitely arose at that time though it was not yet very clearly defined; there was simply some deep irritation caused by the work I was doing, something quite fundamental I did not understand. Of course, so many things are not understood when one is a graduate student. However, my nagging question was not a technical issue, not merely a mathematical concept that was difficult to grasp.