Michael Epperson

Principal Investigator: Michael Epperson (CPNS-CSUS). Co-Investigators: Elias Zafiris, Senior Research Fellow in Theoretical and Mathematical Physics, University of Athens; Stuart Kauffman, Research Professor, Complex Systems Center, University of Vermont; Timothy Eastman, NASA-Goddard; Phillip Stamp, Professor of Physics, University of British Columbia; Karim Bschir, Swiss Federal Institute of Technology. Consultants: David Finkelstein, Professor Emeritus of Physics, Georgia Institute of Technology; Roland Omnès, Laboratoire de Physique Théorique Université de Paris XI, (Unité Mixte de Recherche, CNRS).

2010-2013 • Supported by a grant from the Fetzer-Franklin Fund (Grant D21C62) - $572,760

This project presents an intuitive, event-ontological interpretation of quantum mechanics formalized via the mathematics of category theory and algebraic topology.

Project page

Principal Investigator: Michael Epperson. Co-Investigators: David Finkelstein, Georgia Institute of Technology; Henry P. Stapp, Lawrence Berkeley National Laboratory; Timothy Eastman, NASA-Goddard.

2008-2009 • Supported by a grant from the Fetzer-Franklin Fund (Grant D11C36) - $209,000.

This project explores the mutually implicative relationship of the causal and logical orders in quantum mechanics and its connection to the mutually implicative relationship of subject and object (viz. contextualized measurement and measured system).

The logical structure of quantum theory emphasizes the importance of the non-unitary, contextualized evolution of the density matrix via von Neumann’s Process 1. The effects of Process 1 are specified by the orthodox von Neumann rules, but the process by which the measurement basis restricts the evolution and fixes a particular projection operator is not specified by any yet-known law or rule. The principle of the causal closure of the physical is thus not validated by the known rules of contemporary quantum physics. 

Von Neumann’s Process 1 was a crucial attempt to render explicit the non-classical, contextualizing effect of the measuring apparatus (‘subject’) upon the measured system (‘object’) in a way that at once preserved the traditional meanings of ‘subject’ and ‘object’ and made possible their coherent application to quantum mechanics. By this framework, the objective state of a classically-conceived ‘measuring subject’ actively, contextually conditions the superposition of potential outcomes states constitutive of the classically conceived ‘object measured.’ Prior to the measurement outcome, the potential objective qualifications of the ‘object-in-process’ always conform to ‘subjective’ contextualization via the measuring apparatus according to its orthonormal basis. The measured system is thus best understood not as a ‘classical object’ but rather a quantum physical ‘object-in-process’—i.e., a history of contextual quantum ‘measurement relations’ or, more generally, ‘quantum praxes.’

Project page

Principal Investigator: Michael Epperson. Co-Investigators: David Finkelstein, Department of Physics, Georgia Institute of Technology; Henry P. Stapp, Lawrence Berkeley National Laboratory; Timothy Eastman, NASA-Goddard.

2007 • Supported by a grant from CTNS-STARS and the John Templeton Foundation - $20,000

Our hypothesis is that any conception of ultimate reality that it is in any way fundamentally describable by physics must presuppose the order of logical implication as a necessary first principle. Several modern interpretations of quantum mechanics have begun to explore, in very small steps, the metaphysical notion of an explicit correlation of the order of efficient causal relation and the order of logical implication as physically, and not merely conceptually, significant. Thus, for example, the logical-mathematical trace-over by which the physical process of decoherence is described in these interpretations is treated as ontologically, and not merely epistemically, significant. We will explore this hypothesis by way of the neo-Aristotelian ontological framework of actuality and potentiality and its suggested application to quantum theory by Heisenberg.