The Heisenberg Interpretation of Quantum Mechanics (Extended Abstract)

Abstract

In his book `Physics and Philosophy', Heisenberg posited a distinction between the quantum and classical worlds, characterized in terms of "potentialities or possibilities" versus "things and facts". However, the standard quantum formalism does not express such an ontological duality. This extended abstract presents a concrete implementation of his distinction into the quantum formalism, resulting in what will be called the Heisenberg interpretation of quantum mechanics. The implementation mainly involves replacing state reduction by a composition of two maps between the Hilbert space and a set of corresponding classical states. These maps represent the actualization and deactualization of a classical state from a quantum state from interactions labeled "measurements". This modified formalism has a number of advantages over the Copenhagen interpretation which will be discussed in the full paper.