The Modal-Hamiltonian Interpretation of quantum mechanics

OLIMPIA LOMBARDI

Río de Janeiro

Conferencia; Philosophical Problems of Quantum Mechanics; 2020

Seminario Iberoamericano de Filosofía de la Ciencia

As it is well-known in the philosophy of physics community, traditional modal interpretations do not pick out the right properties for the apparatus in non-ideal measurements, that is, in measurements that do not introduce a perfect correlation between the possible states of the measured system and the possible states of the measuring apparatus. Since ideal measurement is a situation that can never be achieved in practice, this shortcoming was considered a "silver bullet" for killing modal interpretations. Perhaps these problems explain the decline 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 modal interpretations whose preferred context depends on the state of the system, the natural alternative for a realist is Bohmian mechanics, which can be conceived as a member of the modal family whose preferred context is a priori defined by the position observable. But position is not the only observable that can be appealed to in order to define the state-independent preferred context of a modal interpretation. The purpose of this talk is to introduce the Modal-Hamiltonian Interpretation (MHI) of quantum mechanics, 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 immune to the non-ideal measurement´s "silver bullet", since it accounts for ideal and non-ideal measurements. Furthermore, the MHI also supplies a criterion to distinguish between reliable and non-reliable measurements in the non-ideal case. Moreover, the MHI can be reformulated under an explicitly Galilean-invariant form in terms of the Casimir operators of the Galilean group. Such a reformulation not only leads to results that agree with usual assumptions in the practice of physics, but also suggests the extrapolation of the interpretation to quantum field theory by changing accordingly the symmetry group, in this case, the Poincaré group. Finally, the MHI provides a "global" solution to the ontological problems of quantum mechanics in terms of a quantum ontology of properties.