Boolean logic is sufficient to work with quantum mechanics

12/07/2015
Even though a whole "community" of would-be scientists nurture a religion
based on the (scientifically debunked) dogma that there is something
incomplete or unsatisfying about quantum mechanics, quantum mechanics has
worked extremely well for 90 years and it really takes a few lines to fully and
rigorously describe its general rules and check that they don't suffer from any
flaw.

Quantum mechanics is a framework to produce predictions or construct valid

statements about Nature our of some known facts about Nature. According to
this framework, every physical system is described by a Hilbert space H on
which linear operators act. Everything we know or want to know an
observable is associated with such an operator (or operators).

The prediction works as follows. We want to know something about the next
measurement new information we are going to learn if we "live". Without a
loss of generality, this information may always be decomposed to answers to
Yes/No questions which are associated with Hermitian projection operators P.
Because P2=P, the eigenvalues are either zero (No) or one (Yes).

Quantum mechanics answers the (N+1)-st question linked to the operator

PN+1 probabilistically, by calculating the probability that the answer is going to
be Yes. The probability is
Prob=|PN+1||2
or, in the case of mixed states,
Prob=Tr(PN+1PN+1)
where I could have omitted one of the copies of PN+1 because it's a projection
operator, but I chose to keep it for symmetry reason.

The pure state | that we need to substitute to the formula for the probability
above is
|=Norm[T(i=1NPi)|in]
where Pi are the projection operators corresponding to all the questions whose
answers were measured and found to be Yes and in is the "truly" initial state
before all these measurements which becomes irrelevant if the sequence of
the operators Pi is sufficiently long.

The symbol "Norm" means "normalization" (the division of the ket vector inside
by its length) for the sake of simplicity, we keep | normalized to unity. The
meta-operator T is the time ordering: the operators Pi are sorted so that the
measurements that took place first appear on the right, closer to |in. Those
that took place later are on the left side from them.

Note that if the operators Pi are constructed from field operators in a relativistic
quantum field theory, they (super)commute at spacelike separation, so a pair
of operators Pi and Pi+1 that are spacelike-separated may be ordered in both
ways. The ordering becomes irrelevant for them.

On the other hand, if Pi and Pi+1 don't (super)commute with one another, their
ordering is extremely important. And if they're associated with the same value
of time t, like if the two adjacent projection operators depend on x(t) and p(t),
the ordering becomes ill-defined if these operators don't (super)commute. This
is why the position and momentum (and any pair of non-commuting operators)
can't be measured at the same moment. If you try to do such things on paper,
the formalism breaks down and you fail as a theorist. If you try to measure
them (non-commuting operators) simultaneously in reality, you will fail as a
practician. Non-commuting observables can't be simultaneously measured
which is why their products won't appear in the expressions that predict
probabilities of anything meaningful, either.

Again, I emphasize that the formalism of quantum mechanics depends on the

chronology. One must know what events or measurements occurred first and
which occurred later because the ordering is translated to the ordering of the
application of the projection operators or "collapses" of the wave function, if
you like this problematic jargon and the ordering matters. Also, the arrow of
time matters. The past operators are always closer to the kets (or bras, if there
is another copy of all these operators in the conjugate part of the formula)
there is simply no Z2 symmetry between the future and the past in the full
formalism that predicts probabilities. The Heisenberg equations for operators
may be time-reversal-symmetric (or CPT-symmetric, which is always the case in
quantum field theories) but the full formalism that actually calculates
probabilities out of them is simply not! This is nothing else than the quantum
analogy of the fact that the hypotheses and evidence play asymmetric roles in
ordinary Bayes' theorem.

The density matrix to substitute is similarly

=NormT(i=1NPi)inT(i=1NPi)
where the dagger simply reverts the ordering of the chronological metaoperator T. Again, the "past" operators on both sides are closer to than the
future operators. The normalization Norm of the density matrix is nothing else
than the division of the argument by its trace.

(If we weren't sure about the results of measurements of Pi, we could write
down a more complicated form of the density matrix with many terms
weighted by probabilities.)

That's it. Quantum mechanics tells us that we must know what we want to
know we must specify the questions (the relevant observables that are
measured) before quantum mechanics may tell us the (probabilistic answers).
Without a well-defined question (and a choice of this question depends on an
observer who can "perceive" the results or who "cares" about the results),
there can't be a well-defined answer. Unlike classical physics, there is no
engine that would provide us with the "right questions" at the same moment.

There are many different questions that may be asked about a physical system
but due to the complementarity or the uncertainty principle, they can't be
simultaneously meaningful. You either want to know the position of a particle
after some process; or its momentum. You just can't ask about both at the
same moment. These questions are only meaningful to the extent to which
they are measured and if one measures the position, the value(s) of the
momentum change, and vice versa.

Every question about an arbitrary physical system in Nature that can't be

translated to the template above or some of its allowed modest
generalizations which still respect the Hilbert-space and probabilistic character
of quantum mechanics, I don't want to go into it is physically meaningless.
There's nothing wrong with this proposition. Every theory must decide which
sentences are meaningful and which are not (and there always exist sentences
in both groups). Quantum mechanics forces us to phrase everything we insert
as input the initial state etc. and everything we want to know in terms of
observables i.e. operators and their measured values. This condition is in no
way constraining (or a rule that would be making quantum mechanics
incomplete) because we can't really know anything about Nature without some
kind of measurement. So it's just fine if quantum mechanics assumes and
depends on this self-evident fact. And be sure that it does.

That's it. There is no justification for writing dozens of articles full of doubts and
dissatisfaction. Who can't understand, in 2015, the rules above and the fact
that they represent a totally internally consistent and logically complete
framework that may be used to explain everything we know about Nature, is a
retarded imbecile, euphemistically speaking.

Boolean logic

Note that the formalism above was still answering Yes/No questions one could
have reformulated the framework in terms of general observables with
arbitrary spectra but I chose the Yes/No approach which is enough and
equivalent. It means that it was assigning truth values to logical propositions.
The observations done in the past already have well-defined truth values. The
observations that will be done in the future don't have well-defined truth values
yet. Quantum mechanics allows us to calculate the probability that the value is
"zero" or "one".

Boolean logic is totally OK because the measurements assign truth values to

particular propositions and these truth values obviously behave just like they
always did in Boolean logic. It is really misleading to use the term "classical
logic" because there is nothing in Boolean logic that depends on classical
physics on the framework of physics which assumes that there is a phase
space of objective states with some dynamical laws how the point on this
phase space evolves. Quantum mechanical physicists, as I have shown, use the
same Boolean logic to study Nature. So Boolean logic is both classical and
quantum; its applicability is not constrained in similar ways.

A Romanian blog post "Boolean logic and quantum mechanics" has claimed
that quantum mechanics forces us to abandon Boolean logic but it simply ain't
so. The measurement is what connects the new "engine" inside quantum
mechanics to the usual truth values of propositions we used to use in classical
physics as well.

The projection operators Pi in the formalism at the top generically don't

commute with each other. In some sense, the algebra they represent is "nonclassical" in the sense of "non-commuting". But when we normally talk about
logic, we talk about the particular truth values of propositions that have already
been measured, not the whole operators, and those are commuting. The
actual, measured truth values are commuting they are just not
"deterministically" or "unambiguously" calculable from the initial state using a
valid physical theory. Quantum mechanics doesn't allow such calculations.

In 1935, Birkhoff and von Neumann proposed their quantum logic, a

generalization of the mathematical axioms for logic in which e.g. the
distributive law for Boolean values doesn't hold. It was a rather weird paper
and it has in no way become a part of the standard physics cannon because
it's not needed. Physicists like those in Copenhagen haven't started to use it
because while it can be a mathematically consistent set of axioms and
definitions inspired by quantum mechanics, it's not needed in physics. It brings
nothing new to physics. Even Matt Leifer has said "No" to the Birkhoffvon_Neumann logic. Also, the Wikipedia article admits that the Birkhoffvon_Neumann work is pretty much just showing some similarity between
algebras of operators and logic. Because of the differences, one may
"generalize" the concept of logic, but all of it is just a repackaging of known
things with no important physical or philosophical consequences.

Boolean logic is just fine in quantum mechanics. Quantum mechanics doesn't

differ from classical physics by the logic it uses; it differs by the character of
the predictions it allows us to make about the truth value of propositions about
future measurements and the general algorithm how to make these
predictions.