Measurement as Sheafification: Context, Logic, and Truth after Quantum Mechanics

• URL: http://arxiv.org/abs/2512.12249v2
• Date: Tue, 16 Dec 2025 13:44:20 GMT
• Title: Measurement as Sheafification: Context, Logic, and Truth after Quantum Mechanics
• Authors: Partha Ghose,
• Abstract summary: I argue that quantum theory is inherently contextual, whereas the classical tradition presupposes a single global, Boolean valuation.<n>I recast locality and completeness as the existence of a global section of a presheaf of value assignments over the category of measurement contexts.
• Score: 0.0
• License: http://creativecommons.org/licenses/by/4.0/
• Abstract: Quantum measurement is commonly posed as a dynamical tension between linear Schrödinger evolution and an ad hoc collapse rule. I argue that the deeper conflict is logical: quantum theory is inherently contextual, whereas the classical tradition presupposes a single global, Boolean valuation. Building on Bohr's complementarity, the Einstein--Podolsky--Rosen argument and Bell's theorem, I recast locality and completeness as the existence of a global section of a presheaf of value assignments over the category of measurement contexts. The absence of global sections expresses the impossibility of context-independent description, and Čech cohomology measures the resulting obstruction. The internal logic of the presheaf topos is intuitionistic, and the seven-valued contextual logic proposed by Ghose and Patra is exhibited as a finite Heyting algebra capturing patterns of truth, falsity and indeterminacy across incompatible contexts. Classical physics corresponds to the sheaf case, where compatible local data glue and Boolean logic is effectively restored. Measurement is therefore reinterpreted as sheafification of presheaf-valued truth rather than as a physical breakdown of unitarity. Finally, a $σ$--$λ$ dynamics motivated by stochastic mechanics provides a continuous interpolation between strongly contextual and approximately classical regimes, dissolving the usual measurement paradoxes and apparent nonlocality as artefacts of an illegitimate demand for global truth.

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