While its applications have made quantum theory arguably the most successful theory in physics, its interpretation continues to be the subject of lively debate within the community of physicists and philosophers concerned with conceptual foundations. This situation poses a problem for a pragmatist for whom meaning derives from use. While disputes about how to use quantum theory have arisen from time to time, they have typically been quickly resolved, and consensus reached, within the relevant scientific sub-community. Yet rival accounts of (...) the meaning of quantum theory continue to proliferate . In this article I offer a diagnosis of this situation and outline a pragmatist solution to the problem it poses, leaving further details for subsequent articles. (shrink)

Given its importance in modern physics, philosophers of science have paid surprisingly little attention to the subject of symmetries and invariances, and they have largely neglected the subtopic of symmetry breaking. I illustrate how the topic of laws and symmetries brings into fruitful interaction technical issues in physics and mathematics with both methodological issues in philosophy of science, such as the status of laws of physics, and metaphysical issues, such as the nature of objectivity.

This article summarizes the Quantum Bayesian point of view of quantum mechanics, with special emphasis on the view's outer edges---dubbed QBism. QBism has its roots in personalist Bayesian probability theory, is crucially dependent upon the tools of quantum information theory, and most recently, has set out to investigate whether the physical world might be of a type sketched by some false-started philosophies of 100 years ago (pragmatism, pluralism, nonreductionism, and meliorism). Beyond conceptual issues, work at Perimeter Institute is focused on (...) the hard technical problem of finding a good representation of quantum mechanics purely in terms of probabilities, without amplitudes or Hilbert-space operators. The best candidate representation involves a mysterious entity called a symmetric informationally complete quantum measurement. Contemplation of it gives a way of thinking of the Born Rule as an addition to the rules of probability theory, applicable when an agent considers gambling on the consequences of his interactions with a newly recognized universal capacity: dimension (formerly Hilbert-space dimension). (The word "capacity" should conjure up an image of something like gravitational mass---a body's mass measures its capacity to attract other bodies. With hindsight one can say that the founders of quantum mechanics discovered another universal capacity, "dimension.") The article ends by showing that the egocentric elements in QBism represent no impediment to pursuing quantum cosmology and outlining some directions for future work. (shrink)

The paper investigates the spontaneous breaking of gauge symmetries in gauge theories from a philosophical angle, taking into account the fact that the notion of a spontaneously broken local gauge symmetry, though widely employed in textbook expositions of the Higgs mechanism, is not supported by our leading theoretical frameworks of gauge quantum theories. In the context of lattice gauge theory, the statement that local gauge symmetry cannot be spontaneously broken can even be made rigorous in the form of Elitzur’s theorem. (...) Nevertheless, gauge symmetry breaking does occur in gauge quantum field theories in the form of the breaking of remnant subgroups of the original local gauge group under which the theories typically remain invariant after gauge fixing. The paper discusses the relation between these instances of symmetry breaking and phase transitions and draws some more general conclusions for the philosophical interpretation of gauge symmetries and their breaking. (shrink)