Philosophic Foundations of Quantum Mechanics

Written by an internationally renowned philosopher, this volume offers a three-part philosophical interpretation of quantum physics. The first part reviews the basics of quantum mechanics, outlining their philosophical interpretation and summarizing their results; the second outlines the mathematical methods of quantum mechanics; and the third section blends the philosophical ideas of the first part and the mathematical formulations of the second part to develop a variety of interpretations of quantum mechanics. 1944 edition.

PART I: GENERAL CONSIDERATIONS
  1. Causal laws and probability laws
  2. The probability distributions
  3. The principle of indeterminacy
  4. The disturbance of the object by the observation
  5. The determination of unobserved objects
  6. Waves and corpuscles
  7. Analysis of an interference experiment
  8. Exhaustive and restrictive interpretations
PART II: OUTLINES OF THE MATHEMATICS OF QUANTUM MECHANICS
  9. Expansion of a function in terms of an orthogonal set
  10. Geometrical interpretation in the function space
  11. Reversion and iteration of transformations.
  12. Functions of several variables and the configuration space
  13. Derivation of Schrödinger's equation from de Broglie's principle
  14. "Operators, eigen-functions, and eigen-values of physical entities"
  15. The commutation rule
  16. Operator matrices
  17. Determination of the Probability distributions
  18. Time dependence of the ?-function
  19. Transformation to other state functions
  20. Observational determination of the ?-function
  21. Mathematical theory of measurement
  22. The rules of probability and the disturbance by the measurement
  23. The nature of probabilities and of statistical assemblages in quantum mechanics
PART III: INTERPRETATIONS
  24. Comparison of classical and quantum mechanical statistics
  25. The corpuscle interpretation
  26. The impossibility of a chain structure
  27. The wave interpretation
  28. Observational language and quantum mechanics
  29. Interpretation by a restricted meaning
  30. Interpretation through a three-valued logic
  31. The rules of two-valued logic
  32. The rules of three-valued logic
  33. Suppression of causal anomalies through a three-valued logic
  34. Indeterminacy in the object language
  35. The limitation of measurability
  36. Correlated systems
  37. Conclusion
  Index