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17Van Fraassen on Preparation and MeasurementPhilosophy of Science 63 (5). 1996.Van Fraassen's 1991 modal interpretation of Quantum Mechanics offers accounts of measurement and state preparation. I argue that both accounts overlook a class of interactions I call General Unitary Measurements, or GUMs. Ironically, GUMs are significant for van Fraassen's account of measurement because they challenge it, and significant for his account of preparation because they simplify it. Van Fraassen's oversight prompts a question about modal interpretations: developed to account for ideal…Read more
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12Science at Centurys End: Philosophical Questions on the Progress and Limits of S (edited book)University of Pittsburgh Press. 2000.To most laypersons and scientists, science and progress appear to go hand in hand, yet philosophers and historians of science have long questioned the inevitability of this pairing. As we take leave of a century acclaimed for scientific advances and progress, Science at Century's End, the eighth volume of the Pittsburgh-Konstanz Series in the Philosophy and History of Science, takes the reader to the heart of this important matter. Subtitled Philosophical Questions on the Progress and Limits of …Read more
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9In a pair of articles and in his recent book, Miklos Redei has taken enormous strides toward characterizing the conditions under which relativistic quantum field theory is a safe setting for the deployment of causal talk. Here, we challenge the adequacy of the accounts of causal dependence and screening off on which rests the relevance of Redei's theorems to the question of causal good behavior in the theory.
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8Review of Jeffrey Bub: Interpreting the Quantum World (review)British Journal for the Philosophy of Science 49 (4): 637-641. 1998.
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7Interpreting BodiesStudies in History and Philosophy of Science Part B: Studies in History and Philosophy of Modern Physics 31 (3): 413-417. 2000.
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6Interpreting Quantum TheoriesIn Peter Machamer & Michael Silberstein (eds.), The Blackwell Guide to the Philosophy of Science, Blackwell. 2002.This chapter contains sections titled: Introduction: Interpretation Bohr and Complementarity The Einstein‐Podolsky‐Rosen (EPR) Argument Bell's Theorem and Other No‐Go Results The Measurement Problem Future Directions: Interpreting QFT.
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5UnBorn: Probability in Bohmian MechanicsPhilosophy of Physics 1 (1). 2023.Why are quantum probabilities encoded in measures corresponding to wave functions, rather than by a more general class of measures? Call this question WHY BORN? I argue that orthodox quantum mechanics has a compelling answer to WHY BORN? but Bohmian mechanics might not. I trace Bohmian difficulties with WHY BORN? to its antistructuralism, its denial of physical significance to the algebraic structure of quantum observables, and I propose other cases where Bohmian antistructuralism might have an …Read more
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1Meinard Kuhlmann, Holger Lyre & Andrew Wayne (Eds), Ontological Aspects of Quantum Field TheoryInternational Studies in the Philosophy of Science 18 98-101. 2004.
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On the Verge of Collapse: Modal Interpretations of Quantum MechanicsDissertation, University of Pittsburgh. 1995.The conjunction of Schrodinger dynamics and the usual way of thinking about the conditions under which quantum systems exhibit determinate values implies that measurements don't have outcomes. The orthodox fix to this quantum measurement problem is von Neumann's postulate of measurement collapse, which suspends Schrodinger dynamics in measurement contexts. Contending that the fundamental dynamical law of quantum theory breaks down every time we test the theory empirically, the collapse postulate…Read more
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Perturbing realismIn Steven French & Juha Saatsi (eds.), Scientific Realism and the Quantum, Oxford University Press. 2020.
Ann Arbor, Michigan, United States of America
Areas of Specialization
Philosophy of Physical Science |
General Philosophy of Science |