Volume 1, Issue 1, pages 1-17
Guido Bacciagaluppi [Show Biography]
I was born in Milan in 1965. After obtaining my degree in mathematics from ETH Zurich and my doctorate in philosophy from the University of Cambridge, I was Research Fellow at Wolfson College, Cambridge, and at Balliol College, Oxford. I was Junior Lecturer at Oxford University, Assistant Professor at the University of California at Berkeley, Humboldt Fellow at the University and the IGPP of Freiburg, CNRS Researcher at the IHPST in Paris, and Senior Research Fellow at the Centre for Time of the University of Sydney before coming to Aberdeen first as Senior Lecturer, then (since August 2011) Reader in Philosophy.
In this paper we first analyse Leggett and Garg’s argument to the effect that macroscopic realism contradicts quantum mechanics. After making explicit all the assumptions in Leggett and Garg’s reasoning, we argue against the plausibility of their auxiliary assumption of non-invasive measurability, using Bell’s construction of stochastic pilot-wave theories as a counterexample. Violations of the Leggett-Garg inequality thus do not provide a good argument against macrorealism per se. We then apply Dzhafarov and Kujala’s analysis of contextuality in the presence of signalling to the case of the Leggett-Garg inequalities, with rather surprising results. An analogy with pilot-wave theory again helps to clarify the situation.
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Leggett, A. J., and Garg, A. (1985),
Quantum Mechanics versus Macroscopic Realism: Is the Flux There when Nobody Looks?, Physical Review Letters 54, 857–860.
Kofler, J., and Brukner, Cˇ . (2013),
Condition for Macroscopic Realism beyond the Leggett–Garg Inequalities, Physical Review A 87(5), 052115,
http://arxiv.org/abs/1207.3666.
Maroney, O., and Timpson, C., (in preparation),
Quantum- vs Macro-Realism: What does the Leggett–Garg Inequality Actually Test?.
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