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A complete description of the thermal interpretation of quantum physics can be found in my just finished papers (for the bare bones, see Section 2.5 of Part II)bhobba said:I think Dr Neumaier has a good point - QFT may indeed be a better place for interpretations. I do not know enough of his thermal interpretation to comment on its specifics.
Foundations of quantum physics I. A critique of the tradition,
Foundations of quantum physics II. The thermal interpretation,
Foundations of quantum physics III. Measurement.
They are also accessible through the arXiv at arXiv:1902.10778 (Part I), arXiv:1902.10779 (Part II), arXiv:1902.10782 (Part III). The simplest quantum system, a qubit, was already described by Stokes 1852, in terms essentially equivalent to the thermal interpretation.
This is a very long thread. DarMM gave in post #268 a nice summary of the thermal interpretation. Post #484 is my very short summary and post #479 contains links to my explanations of the connections between theory and experiments. Open problems related to the thermal interpretation are discussed in post #293.
An additional fourth part (from April 27, 2019) is announced here, and a fifth part (from May 2, 2019) completing the series is here. Reviews (Part I, Part II, Part III, Part IV, Part V) are on PhysicsOverflow, together with some comments by me. The book
- A. Neumaier, Coherent Quantum Physics: A Reinterpretation of the Tradition, de Gruyter, Berlin 2019.
Related threads are about the thermal interpretation of the Stern-Gerlach experiment and the double-slit experiment, about the derivation of atomic and molecular spectra in the thermal interpretation, about the relation to decoherence (which gives an averaged description of the description of measurements given by the thermal interpretation), and about an example illustrating the differences in the interpretation of measurement results in the thermal interpretation and in Born's statistical interpretation. Another thread is about an attempt to disprove a misunderstood version of the thermal interpretation.
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