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The problems in quantum foundations in the light of gauge theories

  • Part III. Invited Papers Dedicated To John Archibald Wheeler
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Abstract

We review the issues of nonseparability and seemingly acausal propagation of information in EPR, as displayed by experiments and the failure of Bell's inequalities. We show that global effects are in the very nature of the geometric structure of modern physical theories, occurring even at the classical level. The Aharonov-Bohm effect, magnetic monopoles, instantons, etc. result from the topology and homotopy features of the fiber bundle manifolds of gauge theories. The conservation of probabilities, a supposedly highly quantum effect, is also achieved through global geometry equations. The EPR observables all fit in such geometries, and space-time is a truncated representation and is not the correct arena for their understanding. Relativistic quantum field theory represents the global action of the measurement operators as the zero-momentum (and therefore spatially infinitely spread) limit of their wave functions (form factors). We also analyze the collapse of the state vector as a case of spontaneous symmetry breakdown in the apparatus-observed state interaction.

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Authors and Affiliations

  1. Center for Particle Theory, The University of Texas at Austin, 78712, Austin, Texas

    Yuval Ne'eman

  2. Sackler Faculty of Exact Sciences, Tel Aviv University, Tel Aviv, Israel

    Yuval Ne'eman

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  1. Yuval Ne'eman
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Additional information

Work supported in part by U.S. DOE Grant DE-FG05-85ER40200.

Wolfson Chair Extraordinary in Theoretical Physics, TAUP N-161-85.

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Ne'eman, Y. The problems in quantum foundations in the light of gauge theories. Found Phys 16, 361–377 (1986). https://doi.org/10.1007/BF01882693

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  • DOI: https://doi.org/10.1007/BF01882693

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