Towards a Quantum Culture: The Different Interpretations of Quantum Mechanics

Session

Quantum mechanics

9 Dec 2025, 14:30

Conveners

Quantum mechanics

• Leonardo Gariboldi

Quantum mechanics

• Enrico Giannetto

Quantum mechanics

• Nadia Robotti

Quantum mechanics

• Luisa Lovisetti

Quantum mechanics

• Salvatore Esposito

Quantum mechanics

• Enrico Giannetto

7. The Transforming Force of Mathematics: From Quantum Jumps to Quantum Mechanics to Quantum Culture, with Werner Heisenberg

Plotnitsky Arkady

09/12/2025, 14:30

Shortly before his discovery of QM was published, Werner Heisenberg said in his letter to Ralph Kronig: “What I really like in this scheme is that one can really reduce all interactions between atoms and the external world to transition probabilities.” This statement reflects a revolutionary transformation—physical, mathematical, and philosophical—that Heisenberg’s theory brought with it....

8. Heisenberg’s 1925 Paper and the Need for a Reinterpretation of the Concept of Trajectory

Marco Giliberti, Luisa Lovisetti

09/12/2025, 15:10

In the abstract of his “Umdeutung” paper—traditionally regarded as the founding act of quantum mechanics—Heisenberg declares that the purpose of his work “is to attempt to establish the foundations for a quantum-theoretical mechanics that is based exclusively on relationships between quantities that are, in principle, observable”. This statement has often drawn readers’ attention to the...

12. Quantum Mechanics, the Universe, and the Multiverse

Helge Kragh

10/12/2025, 09:00

Traditionally considered a theory only of the subatomic domain, quantum mechanics entered cosmology in 1931 with G. Lemaître’s primeval-atom hypothesis. Much later, theories based on quantum gravity, such as string theory and loop quantum gravity, have been developed into cosmological models. Moreover, quantum-based theories of multiple universes have recently attracted much attention. Modern...

13. Interpreting Quantum Mechanics Relationally

Carlo Rovelli

10/12/2025, 09:40

The relational interpretations of quantum mechanics, started in the late 1990's, are suddenly receiving a great deal of attention in the literature. I review the basic ideas, the problems raised, the variants and the current status of this way of looking at quantum theory, which offers a coherent picture of the quantum world without hidden variables, without many worlds, without physical...

14. Enigmas of the sp^hin^x

Jean-Marc Lévy-Leblond

10/12/2025, 10:50

Beyond the well-known epistemological and foundational problems of quantum theory (measurement theory, entanglement, classical limit, etc.), there are others conceptual questions which have been somewhat neglected in the past decades.
I will discuss five of these open questions, all connected with the notion of spin:
‐ the puzzle of the intrinsic magnetic moment
‐ the spin-forces...

15. The Long Quantum Revolution

Jürgen Renn

10/12/2025, 11:30

The talk will review different phases of the quantum revolution with an emphasis on critical developments in the 1920s and the 1950s. On the basis of joint work in the context of the quantum project of the Max Planck Institute for the History of Science it will be shown how the exploration of the limits of classical physics yielded results that served as the scaffolding for the first quantum...

31. Constructivism and the Foundations of Quantum Mechanics

Paolo Perinotti

10/12/2025, 15:00

In the last decades, various efforts have been made in reconstructing the mathematical language of quantum theory from operational axioms. We will propose a perspective on the meaning of such results, highlighting their development that lead to a reconstruction of mechanical notions in a purely information-theoretic framework. We will argue in praise of a constructivist view on the...

20. Perspectives on Recent Developments of de Broglie’s Realistic and Bohr’s Complementary Interpretation of the Wave-Particle Duality

Gino Tarozzi

10/12/2025, 15:40

21. Pauli’s Interpretation of Quantum Physics

Enrico Giannetto

10/12/2025, 16:50

Wolfgang Pauli developed an original interpretation of quantum mechanics in terms of Bohr’s correspondence principle as an ontological texture of physical reality and complementarity principle as a generalization of the correspondence principle. Following Pauli, there is an a-causal connection, a statistical correspondence (non-separability/ “synchronicity”) between quantum microcosm and...

32. Quantum Theory and the Two Foundational Dichotomies

Antonino Drago

10/12/2025, 17:30

Six independent programs of research have led to recognize two dichotomies as the foundations of Physics: one on the kind of infinity, potential or actual, another on the kind of theoretical organization, problem-oriented or deductive-axiomatic. In 1930, first Dirac formulated quantum theory. Contrary to popular belief it was a problem-oriented theory and its mathematics was algebraic, hence...

30. Fermi, Majorana and the First Developments of the New Quantum Theory in Italy

Salvatore Esposito

11/12/2025, 09:00

The introduction of the novel quantum theory in Italy was mainly due to the work of Enrico Fermi, and the Roman school that developed around him between the end of the 1920s and the 1930s produced remarkable results both on the experimental and theoretical side. Especially Fermi and his former “student” Ettore Majorana contributed significantly to showing how the newly born quantum mechanics...