Quantum Systems Other Than the Universe

Abstract

How should we interpret physical theories, and especially quantum theory, if we drop the assumption that we should treat it as an exact description of the whole Universe? I expound and develop the claim that physics is about the study of autonomous, but not necessarily isolated, dynamical systems, and that when applied to quantum mechanics this entails that in general we should take quantum systems as having mixed states and non-unitary dynamics. I argue that nonetheless unitary dynamics continues to have a special place in physics, via the empirically-well-supported reductionist principles that non-unitarity is to be explained by restriction to a subsystem of a larger unitary system and that microscopic physics is governed by unitary and largely known dynamics. I contrast this position with the `Open Systems View' advocated recently by Michael Cuffaro and Stephan Hartmann.