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A Completely Top-Down Hierarchical Structure in Quantum Mechanics

Jeff Tollaksen Related
Physics 27/10/2017

The organizers of this conference defined Emergent Quantum Mechanics as “a possible deeper-level theory that interconnects three fields of knowledge: emergence, the quantum, and information.” Therefore, in this talk, I first ask if it is always possible to completely reduce the behavior of a complex system to the behavior of its simplest atoms. I answer “No” in a new way by using pre- and post-selected many-particle systems. In particular, with an N-particle system, I show that local measurements such as “where is the particle?”, or “where is a pair of particles,” all the way up to “where is any N-1 particles” all provide null results. In addition, questions about any of the correlations between particles, up to the N-1 order correlations, also yield null results. However, we see emergence in the global properties of the whole (i.e. for all N particles), such as the emergence of strong nonlocal correlations. In addition, these high-order (i.e. N-body) correlations can determine lower-order ones, but not vice versa. Moreover, the latter seem to provide no information at all regarding the former. This supports a top-down structure in many-body quantum mechanics. Finally, I elaborate new types of complementarity, particularly those that show new perspectives concerning inner frames-of-reference versus outer.