Thot Taoism And Quantum Theory

We are often told that quantum phenomena demand radical revisions of our scientific world view and that no physical theory describing well defined objects, such as particles described by their positions, evolving in a well defined way, let alone deterministically, can account for such phenomena. The great majority of physicists continue to subscribe to this view, despite the fact that just such a deterministic theory, accounting for all of the phe­ nomena of nonrelativistic quantum mechanics, was proposed by David Bohm more than four decades ago and has arguably been around almost since the inception of quantum mechanics itself. Our purpose in asking colleagues to write the essays for this volume has not been to produce a Festschrift in honor of David Bohm (worthy an undertaking as that would have been) or to gather together a collection of papers simply stating uncritically Bohm's views on quantum mechanics. The central theme around which the essays in this volume are arranged is David Bohm's version of quantum mechanics. It has by now become fairly standard practice to refer to his theory as Bohmian mechanics and to the larger conceptual framework within which this is located as the causal quantum theory program.

This book discusses a link between statistical theory and quantum theory based on the concept of epistemic processes. The latter are processes, such as statistical investigations or quantum mechanical measurements, that can be used to obtain knowledge about something. Various topics in quantum theory are addressed, including the construction of a Hilbert space from reasonable assumptions and an interpretation of quantum states. Separate derivations of the Born formula and the one-dimensional Schrödinger equation are given.

This thesis is devoted to the systematic study of non-local theories that respect Lorentz invariance and are devoid of new, unphysical degrees of freedom. Such theories are attractive for phenomenological applications since they are mostly unconstrained by current experiments. Non-locality has played an increasingly important role in the physics of the last decades, appearing in effective actions in quantum field theory, and arising naturally in string theory and non-commutative geometry.

Special relativity and quantum mechanics are likely to remain the two most important languages in physics for many years to come. The underlying language for both disciplines is group theory. Eugene P. Wigner's 1939 paper on the Unitary Representations of the Inhomogeneous Lorentz Group laid the foundation for unifying the concepts and algorithms of quantum mechanics and special relativity.

An appreciable part of the scientific community seems to believe that contemporary physical theories are likely to affect the construction of any overall philosophical outlook, especially insofar as they are relevant to the settlement of certain persistent philosophical controversies. Two physical conceptions - the theory of relativity and the quantum theory - which have brought about a reformulation of the fundamental principles common to all the natural sciences, are considered particularly important in this regard. These conceptions have shed new light, it is held, on a number of problems involving empiricism and rationalism, determinism and indeterminism, materialism and spiritualism, idealism and realism. Such philosophical implications of the theory of relativity and quantum theory have been Widely discussed by both philosophers and philosophizing physicists. The trend in this development has been to portray these theories as generally conducive to an idealist stance.