PROBING THE STRUCTURE OF QUANTUM MECHANICS

Abstract

We believe that in the decades to come quantum theory will play an increasingly important role for many different fields. One of the reasons is that technology aims at manipulating and controlling information and energy in ever smaller regions of space and windows of time. As a consequence the behavior of the entities to manipulate and control will become more and more quantum. This means not only spectacular advances of new techniques and outlooks on revolutionary applications, but also a constant stress and attention on the theory of quantum mechanics itself. It is well known that quantum mechanics has been scrutinized in all kind of ways during the past decades, but that still a lot of conceptual problems remain. The problems of standard quantum mechanics are however not only of a conceptual nature. Also the formal mathematical structure of quantum mechanics has been investigated with the aim to make the theory more operational and to found the basic concepts in direct correspondence with what happens in the laboratory. Such an operationally founded quantum mechanics may soon become of great value because of the technological