Category:Quantum Theory

This category collects work on quantum theory and quantum mechanics — its formalism, its interpretation, and on this wiki most often its foundations and the objections raised to them.

The recurring complaints are not about the formalism's accuracy, which is not seriously disputed, but about what it is taken to mean. They include: the point-particle assumption, held to attribute to a mathematical abstraction properties — spin, magnetic moment, finite mass, measured extent — that only an extended object could possess; the uncertainty principle, argued by several researchers here to be an artifact of the method of analysis rather than a fact about nature; the abandonment of causality in favour of probability amplitudes; the measurement problem and wavefunction collapse; and Bell's theorem and what exactly it forbids.

The alternatives represented include hidden-variable and deterministic models, classical and structural accounts of quantization such as those under Category:Toroidal Ring, stochastic electrodynamics, and derivations of Planck's constant from underlying physical structure rather than by postulate.