Auletta, Gennaro: The Problem of Quantum Mechanics' Interpretation

Historically, there are mainly three orders of problems:
1) Dualism between theoretical description (unitary evolution) and experimental observations (reduction).
2) Unification of the behaviour of matter (which is apparently corpuscular) and light (which is apparently ondulatory) both in theory and experimental findings.
3) The existence of the different formalisms (apart the Dirac Picture), Heisenberg’s and Schrödinger’s ones, which were thought to be about particle-like and wave-like behaviours, respectively, and in fact turned out to be equivalent (passive and active unitary transformations, respectively).

There have been two opposite directions in answering to these problems:
1) An Idealistic position,
2) a Realist one.
The idealistic position was at least partly embraced by Bohr [1928; 1929], supported in part by von Neumann [1932] and finally supported by Wigner [1961; 1963; 1964]. With a certain moderation it is become part of the Copenhagen interpretation and can be found commonly in many textbooks.

The Realistic position has three main variants [see Auletta/Tarozzi. 2004]:
1) Realism of the particles alone [Born 1953],
2) Realism of the waves alone [Schrödinger 1926; 1927],
3) Realism of both waves and particles [de Broglie 1927; 1956].

All these are forms of classical realism (locality of the entities and perfect determination of their properties) that differently fails to take the first problem seriously into account.

As a middle line between these two extreme forms of interpretation, we have two further orientations:
1) The statistical interpretation [EPR 1935; Ballentine 1970], which has been shown to be finally wrong: In the latter 3o years experiments with individual quantum systems have become possible [see Auletta 2000 for details].
2) The later Heisenberg’s interpretation [1958], which tried to solve the first problem by introducing the idea that the environment could be somehow responsible for an uncontrolled transformation during measurement and proposed to consider quantum systems (before measurement) as a form of weak reality (potential reality).

Now it is possible to pursue this research line by
1) Introducing a more objective and smooth (POVM) understanding of complementarity,
2) Taking into account a distinction between global and local (decoherence and theory of quantum open systems),
3) Distinguishing between the potential information that the initial state of a system contains and the information that can be acquired [Auletta 2005; Horodecki et al. 2005]