The Modal-Hamiltonian Interpretation of quantum mechanics

OLIMPIA LOMBARDI

Rio de Janeiro

Conferencia; Philosophical Problems of Quantum Mechanics; 2020

Universidad Federal de Rio de Janeiro

As it is well-known in the philosophy of physics community, traditionalmodal interpretations do not pick out the rightproperties for the apparatus in non-ideal measurements, that is, inmeasurements that do not introduce a perfect correlation between the possiblestates of the measured system and the possible states of the measuringapparatus. Since ideal measurement is a situation that cannever be achieved in practice, this shortcoming was considered a "silverbullet" for killing modal interpretations. Perhaps these problems explain thedecline of the interest in modal interpretations since the end of the 90´s.Jeffrey Bub´s preference for Bohmian mechanics in those days can be understood in this context: given the difficulties of those traditional modalinterpretations whose preferred context depends on the state of the system, thenatural alternative for a realist is Bohmian mechanics, which can be conceivedas a member of the modal family whose preferred context is a priori defined bythe position observable. But position is not the only observable that can beappealed to in order to define the state-independent preferred context of a modalinterpretation. The purpose ofthis talk is to introduce the Modal-Hamiltonian Interpretation (MHI) of quantummechanics, which belongs to the "modal family" and endows the Hamiltonian ofthe system with a central role in the identification of the preferred context. This makes the MHI immuneto the non-ideal measurement?s "silver bullet", since it accounts for ideal andnon-ideal measurements. Furthermore, the MHI also supplies a criterion todistinguish between reliable and non-reliable measurements in the non-idealcase. Moreover, the MHI can be reformulated under anexplicitly Galilean-invariant form in terms of the Casimir operators of theGalilean group. Such a reformulation not only leads to results that agree withusual assumptions in the practice of physics, but also suggests theextrapolation of the interpretation to quantum field theory by changingaccordingly the symmetry group, in this case, the Poincaré group. Finally, theMHI provides a "global" solution to the ontological problems of quantummechanics in terms of a quantum ontology of properties.