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
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Plotnitsky Arkady09/12/2025, 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....
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Marco Giliberti, Luisa Lovisetti09/12/2025, 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...
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Helge Kragh10/12/2025, 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...
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Carlo Rovelli10/12/2025, 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...
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Jean-Marc Lévy-Leblond10/12/2025, 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.
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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... -
Jürgen Renn10/12/2025, 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...
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Paolo Perinotti10/12/2025, 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...
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Gino Tarozzi10/12/2025, 15:40
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Enrico Giannetto10/12/2025, 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...
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Antonino Drago10/12/2025, 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...
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Salvatore Esposito11/12/2025, 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...
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