Against 'Particles' and 'Collapses' in Quantum Entanglement.

CHRISTIAN DE RONDE; CÉSAR MASSRI

A True Polymath: A Tribute to Francisco Antonio Doria

College Publication

Año: 2021; p. 38 - 67

The basis of what is known today as Standard Quantum Mechanics (SQM) was established by Paul Dirac and John von Neumann during the early 1930s. According to this view, QM talks about a microscopic realm con- stituted by elementary particles represented by quantum superpositions of many states which ?collapse? when observed in the act of measurement. One of the major attacks against SQM was produced during the year 1935 when Albert Einstein and Erwin Schrödinger discussed what they called ?entanglement? (Verschränkung, in German). However, mainly due to what was considered the triumph of Niels Bohr, their notion together with their critical arguments remained buried for almost half a century. This was until, due to Alain Aspect?s experiments, physicists begun to recognize the relevance of quantum entanglement for information processing. During the 1990s, with the rise of Foundations of QM and Quantum Information, entanglement became to be known as just a new chapter of SQM itself. In this work we attempt to address some of the difficulties present in such contemporary understanding of entanglement specifically related to the existence of quantum particles and their separability. We will then turn our attention to two recent approaches which might offer a way out of this conundrum by dropping the notion of ?quantum system?. While the first, called device-independent approach, proposes an (anti-metaphysical) operational-linguistic scheme which reminds us of Bohr?s interpretation; the second approach which might be linked to the works of Einstein, Heisenberg and Pauli, takes an essentially cre- ative metaphysical path which seeks to develop a new (non-classical) representation of entanglement grounded on the potential coding of intensive and effective relations.