In The Foundations of Quantum Mechanics - Historical Analysis and Open Questions, leading Italian researchers involved in different aspects of the foundations and history of quantum mechanics are brought together in an interdisciplinary debate. The book therefore presents an invaluable overview of the state of Italian work in the field at this moment, and of the open problems that still exist in the foundations of the theory. Audience: Physicists, logicians, mathematicians and epistemologists whose research concerns the historical analysis of quantum mechanics.

This volume provides a sample of the present research on the foundations of quantum mechanics and related topics by collecting the papers of the Italian scholars who attended the conference entitled “The Foundations of Quantum Mechanics — Historical Analysis and Open Questions” (Lecce, 1998). The perspective of the book is interdisciplinary, and hence philosophical, historical and technical papers are gathered together so as to allow the reader to compare different viewpoints and cultural approaches. Most of the papers confront, directly or indirectly, the objectivity problem, taking into account the positions of the founders of QM or more recent developments. More specifically, the technical papers in the book pay special attention to the interpretation of the experiments on Bell's inequalities and to decoherence theory, but topics on unsharp QM, the consistent-history approach, quantum probability and alternative theories are also discussed. Furthermore, a number of historical and philosophical papers are devoted to Planck's, Weyl's and Pauli's thought, but topics such as quantum ontology, predictivity of quantum laws, etc., are treated.

This volume provides a unique overview of recent Italian studies on the foundations of quantum mechanics and related historical, philosophical and epistemological topics. A gathering of scholars from diverse cultural backgrounds, the conference provided a forum for a fascinating exchange of ideas and perspectives on a range of open questions in quantum mechanics. The varied nature of the papers in this volume attests to the achievement of that aim with many contributions providing original solutions to established problems by taking into account recommendations from different disciplines.

This volume provides a sample of the present research on the foundations of quantum mechanics and related topics by collecting the papers of the Italian scholars who attended the conference entitled ?The Foundations of Quantum Mechanics ? Historical Analysis and Open Questions? (Lecce, 1998). The perspective of the book is interdisciplinary, and hence philosophical, historical and technical papers are gathered together so as to allow the reader to compare different viewpoints and cultural approaches. Most of the papers confront, directly or indirectly, the objectivity problem, taking into account the positions of the founders of QM or more recent developments. More specifically, the technical papers in the book pay special attention to the interpretation of the experiments on Bell's inequalities and to decoherence theory, but topics on unsharp QM, the consistent-history approach, quantum probability and alternative theories are also discussed. Furthermore, a number of historical and philosophical papers are devoted to Planck's, Weyl's and Pauli's thought, but topics such as quantum ontology, predictivity of quantum laws, etc., are treated.

The aim of this book is twofold: to provide a comprehensive account of the foundations of the theory and to outline a theoretical and philosophical interpretation suggested from the results of the last twenty years.There is a need to provide an account of the foundations of the theory because recent experience has largely confirmed the theory and offered a wealth of new discoveries and possibilities. On the other side, the following results have generated a new basis for discussing the problem of the interpretation: the new developments in measurement theory; the experimental generation of ?Schr”dinger cats?; recent developments which allow, for the first time, the simultaneous measurement of complementary observables; quantum information processing, teleportation and computation.To accomplish this task, the book combines historical, systematic and thematic approaches.

The treatment of time in quantum mechanics is still an important and challenging open question in the foundation of the quantum theory. This multi-authored book, written as an introductory guide for newcomers to the subject, as well as a useful source of information for the expert, covers many of the open questions. The book describes the problems, and the attempts and achievements in defining, formalizing and measuring different time quantities in quantum theory.