Against (unitary) interpretation (of quantum mechanics): removing the metaphysical load

• URL: http://arxiv.org/abs/2409.17061v1
• Date: Wed, 25 Sep 2024 16:19:44 GMT
• Title: Against (unitary) interpretation (of quantum mechanics): removing the metaphysical load
• Authors: Marek Żukowski, Marcin Markiewicz,
• Abstract summary: We show that "unitary quantum mechanics", which according to its followers leads to some interesting paradoxes, is an interpretation of quantum mechanics. The root of "unitary" vs. operational discrepancy is that the latter treats the measurement process as irreversible.
• Score: 0.0
• License: http://creativecommons.org/licenses/by/4.0/
• Abstract: Physics is a science. Thus a statement can be treated as its "law" only if it agrees with our experience of the World/Nature (this includes our experiments). Statements which are fundamentally untestable are hypotheses which belong to metaphysics. Such are all interpretations of quantum mechanics, which attribute to its mathematical tools meanings that are beyond experimentally observable events, while not affecting quantum predictions of these events. We show that "unitary quantum mechanics", which according to its followers leads to some interesting paradoxes, is an interpretation of quantum mechanics, based on hypotheses that are untestable. The (operational) quantum mechanics, which is the one tested in every quantum experiment is free of these paradoxes. The root of "unitary" vs. operational discrepancy is that the latter treats the measurement process as irreversible, and in the different answers to the question of what is described by the state vector. The clearest manifestation of this is the insistence of the supporters of "unitary quantum mechanics" that measurements can be "in principle undone". "Unitarists" also try to avoid the postmeasurement state vector collapse at any cost, including no attempt to describe it, but still accept the Born rule as a calculational tool. Ipso facto, the hypothesis of "in principle possibility of undoing measurements" belongs to metaphysics, as it is untestable. In the case of predictions of factual events in the laboratories the ``unitary" quantum mechanics agrees with the operational one. It shares this property with all interpretations of quantum mechanics which do not affect its predictions. Metaphysics begins when one requests that quantum mechanics should be more than a mathematically formulated theory which predicts future observable events of a certain class basing on events observed earlier (of the same class).

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