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Full-Text Articles in Quantum Physics

Physics: Rethinking The Foundations, Kevin H. Knuth Oct 2014

Physics: Rethinking The Foundations, Kevin H. Knuth

Physics Faculty Scholarship

Physics is traditionally conceived of as a set of laws that universally governs the behavior of physical systems. These laws, however they are decreed, are believed to govern the behavior of not only everything in the universe, but the form of the universe itself. However, this traditional concept of physics as a universal governance is at odds with our modern theories of quantum mechanics and relativity, which place the observer and information in a central role. In this talk, I aim to rethink the foundations and attempt to build physics from the bottom up based on a very simple foundational …


Momentum And Spin In Entropic Quantum Dynamics, Shahid Nawaz Jan 2014

Momentum And Spin In Entropic Quantum Dynamics, Shahid Nawaz

Legacy Theses & Dissertations (2009 - 2024)

We study quantum theory as an example of entropic inference. Our goal is to remove conceptual difficulties that arise in quantum mechanics. Since probability is a common feature of quantum theory and of any inference problem, we briefly introduce probability theory and the entropic methods to update probabilities when new information becomes available. Nelson's stochastic mechanics and Caticha's derivation of quantum theory are discussed in the subsequent chapters. Our first goal is to understand momentum and angular momentum within an entropic dynamics framework and to derive the corresponding uncertainty relations. In this framework momentum is an epistemic concept -- it …