This work has grown out of the lecture notes that were prepared for a series of seminars on some selected topics in quantum logic. The seminars were delivered during the first semester of the 1993/1994 academic year in the Unit for Foundations of Science of the Department of History and Foundations of Mathematics and Science, Faculty of Physics, Utrecht University, The Netherlands, while I was staying in that Unit on a European Community Research Grant, and in the Center for Philosophy of Science, University of Pittsburgh, U. S. A. , where I was staying during the 1994/1995 academic year as a Visiting Fellow on a Fulbright Research Grant, and where I also was supported by the Istvan Szechenyi Scholarship Foundation. The financial support provided by these foundations, by the Center for Philosophy of Science and by the European Community is greatly acknowledged, and I wish to thank D. Dieks, the professor of the Foundations Group in Utrecht and G. Massey, the director of the Center for Philosophy of Science in Pittsburgh for making my stay at the respective institutions possible. I also wish to thank both the members of the Foundations Group in Utrecht, especially D. Dieks, C. Lutz, F. Muller, J. Uffink and P. Vermaas and the participants in the seminars at the Center for Philosophy of Science in Pittsburgh, especially N. Belnap, J. Earman, A. Janis, J. Norton, and J.

This volume examines the logic, theory and mathematics of quantum mechanics in a clear and thorough way.

Quantum probability is a subtle blend of quantum mechanics and classical probability theory. Its important ideas can be traced to the pioneering work of Richard Feynman in his path integral formalism. Only recently have the concept and ideas of quantum probability been presented in a rigorous axiomatic framework, and this book provides a coherent and comprehensive exposition of this approach. It gives a unified treatment of operational statistics, generalized measure theory and the path integral formalism that can only be found in scattered research articles. The first two chapters survey the necessary background in quantum mechanics and probability theory and therefore the book is fairly self-contained, assuming only an elementary knowledge of linear operators in Hilbert space.

Quantum mechanics is said to be the most successful physical theory ever. It is, in fact, unique in its success when applied to concrete physical problems. On the other hand, however, it raises profound conceptual problems that are equally unprecedented. Quantum logic, the topic of this volume, can be described as an attempt to cast light on the puzzle of quantum mechanics from the point of view of logic. Since its inception in the famous 1936 paper by Birkhoff and von Neumann entitled, "The logic of quantum mechanics, quantum logic has undergone an enormous development. Various schools of thought and approaches have emerged, and there are a variety of technical results. The chapters of this volume constitute a comprehensive presentation of the main schools, approaches and results in the field of quantum logic. - Authored by eminent scholars in the field - Material presented is of recent origin representing the frontier of the subject - Provides the most comprehensive and varied discussion of Quantum Mechanics available

The twentieth century has witnessed a striking transformation in the un derstanding of the theories of mathematical physics. There has emerged clearly the idea that physical theories are significantly characterized by their abstract mathematical structure. This is in opposition to the tradi tional opinion that one should look to the specific applications of a theory in order to understand it. One might with reason now espouse the view that to understand the deeper character of a theory one must know its abstract structure and understand the significance of that struc ture, while to understand how a theory might be modified in light of its experimental inadequacies one must be intimately acquainted with how it is applied. Quantum theory itself has gone through a development this century which illustrates strikingly the shifting perspective. From a collection of intuitive physical maneuvers under Bohr, through a formative stage in which the mathematical framework was bifurcated (between Schrödinger and Heisenberg) to an elegant culmination in von Neumann's Hilbert space formulation the elementary theory moved, flanked even at the later stage by the ill-understood formalisms for the relativistic version and for the field-theoretic altemative; after that we have a gradual, but constant, elaboration of all these quantal theories as abstract mathematical struc tures (their point of departure being von Neumann's formalism) until at the present time theoretical work is heavily preoccupied with the manip ulation of purely abstract structures.

John von Neumann (1903-1957) was undoubtedly one of the scientific geniuses of the 20th century. The main fields to which he contributed include various disciplines of pure and applied mathematics, mathematical and theoretical physics, logic, theoretical computer science, and computer architecture. Von Neumann was also actively involved in politics and science management and he had a major impact on US government decisions during, and especially after, the Second World War. There exist several popular books on his personality and various collections focusing on his achievements in mathematics, computer science, and economy. Strangely enough, to date no detailed appraisal of his seminal contributions to the mathematical foundations of quantum physics has appeared. Von Neumann's theory of measurement and his critique of hidden variables became the touchstone of most debates in the foundations of quantum mechanics. Today, his name also figures most prominently in the mathematically rigorous branches of contemporary quantum mechanics of large systems and quantum field theory. And finally - as one of his last lectures, published in this volume for the first time, shows - he considered the relation of quantum logic and quantum mechanical probability as his most important problem for the second half of the twentieth century. The present volume embraces both historical and systematic analyses of his methodology of mathematical physics, and of the various aspects of his work in the foundations of quantum physics, such as theory of measurement, quantum logic, and quantum mechanical entropy. The volume is rounded off by previously unpublished letters and lectures documenting von Neumann's thinking about quantum theory after his 1932 Mathematical Foundations of Quantum Mechanics. The general part of the Yearbook contains papers emerging from the Institute's annual lecture series and reviews of important publications of philosophy of science and its history.

Takes students and researchers on a tour through some of the deepest ideas of maths, computer science and physics.

For many years physics and mathematics have had a fruitful influence on one another. Classical mechanics and celestial mechanics have produced very deep problems whose solutions have enhanced mathematics. On the other hand, mathematics itself has found interesting theories which then (sometimes after many years) have been reflected in physics, confirming the thesis that nothing is more practical than a good theory. The same is true for the younger physical discipline -of quantum mechanics. In the 1930s two events, not at all random, became: The mathematical back grounds of both quantum mechanics and probability theory. In 1936, G. Birkhoff and J. von Neumann published their historical paper "The logic of quantum mechanics", in which a quantum logic was suggested. The mathematical foundations of quantum mechanics remains an outstanding problem of mathematics, physics, logic and philosophy even today. The theory of quantum logics is a major stream in this axiomatical knowledge river, where L(H), the system of all closed subspaces of a Hilbert space H, due to J. von Neumann, plays an important role. When A.M. Gleason published his solution to G. Mackey's problem showing that any state (= probability measure) corresponds to a density operator, he probably did not anticipate that his solution would become a cornerstone of ax iomati cal theory of quantum mechanics nor that it would provide many interesting applications to mathematics.