Dustin Lazarovici

Dustin Lazarovici
Technion – Israel Institute of Technology | technion

Dr. rer. nat.

About

80
Publications
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Introduction
Dustin Lazarovici currently works at the Section de philosophie, University of Lausanne. Dustin does research in Philosophy of Physics, Philosophy of Science, Mathematical Physics and Foundations of Quantum Mechanics. His current research interests include "Typicality as a way of reasoning in science", "Nonlocality and Relativity", "Entropy and the Arrow of Time".
Additional affiliations
January 2016 - February 2022
University of Lausanne
Position
  • Research Assistant
October 2011 - September 2015
Ludwig-Maximilians-Universität in Munich
Position
  • Research Assistant
Education
March 2011 - December 2015
Ludwig-Maximilians-Universität in Munich
Field of study
  • Mathematical Physics
September 2007 - July 2008
McGill University
Field of study
  • Physics, Mathematics
May 2005 - September 2011

Publications

Publications (80)
Article
Full-text available
This paper examines no-hidden-variables theorems in quantum mechanics from the point of view of statistical mechanics. It presents a general analysis of the measurement process in the Boltzmannian framework that leads to a characterization of (in)compatible measurements and reproduces several features of quantum probabilities often described as “no...
Chapter
In this short chapter, I will discuss applications of typicality beyond statistical mechanics and probability theory. On the one hand, this will emphasize the wide scope and philosophical potential of typicality. On the other hand, the appeal to probabilistic concepts is very dubious in the following examples, so they should help to further clarify...
Chapter
Any fundamental physical theory is a theory of the universe as a whole. Its laws describe the evolution of the entire configuration of matter. Thus, in classical mechanics, where the forces range over all physical space, the motion of any particle at any given time depends, strictly speaking, on the positions of all the other particles and hence on...
Chapter
A joke is never good if one has to explain the punchline. But since I have limited comedic ambitions, I am going to do exactly that. The dispersion of heat in a volume, such as your living room, is a thermodynamic process, an instance of the second law, in fact. It can be phenomenologically described by the heat equation but is well understood, fro...
Chapter
The following chapter is rather technical and can be skipped without great loss if the reader is eager to get to the meat, namely, applications of typicality in physics. Its main goal is to further disentangle the concepts of typicality and probability. Since typicality results are usually formulated in terms of measure theory—most conveniently wit...
Chapter
Our discussions have been based almost exclusively on deterministic laws. Some might object that this is not very naturalistic. Aren’t our best physical theories, viz. quantum theories, indeterministic? The short answer is that they most likely are not. While it is folklore that intrinsic randomness takes hold in quantum mechanics, the claim does n...
Chapter
The objective probabilities we encounter in the world are the results of physical processes. Grounding them in the fundamental micro-physical laws is thus the task of statistical mechanics, broadly construed. Of course, in the narrower sense, we think of statistical mechanics as being primarily concerned with thermodynamic regularities, from gas la...
Chapter
In what seems like a terminological nod to David Chalmers’s (1995) problems of consciousness, Sheldon Goldstein (Boltzmann’s Approach to Statistical Mechanics. In Bricmont, J., Dürr, D., Galavotti, M. C., Ghirardi, G., Petruccione, F., and Zanghì, N., (eds.), Chance in Physics: Foundations and Perspectives, pp. 39–54. Springer, Berlin) introduces t...
Chapter
The second premise could be denied by admitting something like propensities into the physical ontology. But we can replace the word “facts” with “empirical facts” and end up with an analogous conclusion: logically, no empirical facts follow from probabilistic ones. In particular, we cannot deduce from probability theory that the frequency with whic...
Chapter
Over the past few decades, the best system account has developed into a popular, maybe even dominant, position regarding the metaphysics of the laws of nature. In a nutshell, this view holds that the laws of nature are merely descriptive, an efficient summary of contingent regularities that we find in the world. Metaphysically, it is based on the t...
Chapter
This chapter will discuss statistical mechanics in the manner of Ludwig Boltzmann (1844–1906). I will focus, in particular, on Boltzmann’s account of thermodynamic irreversibility and the second law of thermodynamics—the most profound legacy of the great Austrian physicist, in which the role of typicality comes out particularly clearly. In contempo...
Chapter
This chapter will address the special sciences, in particular the reduction of special science laws to microphysical laws.
Chapter
While causal intuitions are integral to our experience of the world, corresponding relations between states or events are conspicuously absent in its micro-physical description. If the fundamental laws are bi-deterministic (they don’t even have to be time-symmetric), the complete state of the universe at any moment in time determines its complete s...
Chapter
Although the formula engraved on Boltzmann’s tombstone is Eq. (8.1), connecting the entropy of a system with the measure associated with its macrostate, his name is at least as intimately associated with the Boltzmann equation and the H-theorem, describing, in a more quantitative manner, convergence to equilibrium for a low-density gas. This H-theo...
Chapter
Although one of this book’s primary goals is to clarify the formal, conceptual, and metaphysical differences between typicality and probability, I will start by discussing typicality in the context of standard probability theory. As a first approximation, it is not inappropriate to read “typical” as a synonym for “very probable”; the more philosoph...
Chapter
It is also in this chapter that we begin to decouple the notion of typicality from that of “very high probability” and free it from unnecessary connotations of ignorance or chanciness. What is typical is simply what obtains in the overwhelming majority of possible cases. This gives Cournot’s principle an immediate intuitive appeal that further vali...
Article
Full-text available
A longstanding issue in the Everettian (Many-Worlds) interpretation is to justify and make sense of the Born rule that underlies the statistical predictions of standard quantum mechanics. The paper offers a reappraisal of Everett’s original account in light of the recent literature on the concept of typicality. It argues that Everett’s derivation o...
Preprint
Full-text available
Bohmian mechanics grounds the predictions of quantum mechanics in precise dynamical laws for a primitive ontology of point particles. In an appraisal of the de-Broglie-Bohm theory, the paper discusses the crucial epistemological and conceptual role that a primitive ontology plays within a physical theory. It argues that quantum theories without pri...
Article
Full-text available
Bohmian mechanics grounds the predictions of quantum mechanics in precise dynamical laws for a primitive ontology of point particles. In an appraisal of the de-Broglie–Bohm theory, the paper discusses the crucial epistemological and conceptual role that a primitive ontology plays within a physical theory. It argues that quantum theories without pri...
Chapter
As mentioned in Chap. 2, different quantum theories without observers have been suggested and we shall present one now which is particularly well worked out: Bohmian mechanics—a quantum theory of particles in motion.
Chapter
This will be a very hard chapter. Not because of abstract and technically advanced mathematics, which can easily be learned as soon as the underlying physics is clear, that is, as soon as the need for abstraction is evident. It will be hard for two reasons. First, there does not exist a fundamental, mathematically coherent and consistent formulatio...
Chapter
What has been said so far is all well and good, but the implications of the quantum phenomena and the measurement problem of orthodox quantum mechanics are far from conclusive. We appear to be left with many options: determinism (Bohm, Everett) or indeterminism (GRW), many worlds or a single one, particles or flashes or the wave function alone—all...
Chapter
We have to talk about Schrödinger’s cat. Not just because Erwin Schrödinger found such a memorable way to illustrate his paradox. More importantly, his criticism hits the nail right on the head. Schrödinger formulates the so-called measurement problem of quantum mechanics, and this measurement problem shows why the naive understanding of quantum th...
Chapter
Hugh Everett III is credited as the father of the Many Worlds theory, although the name was only later introduced by Brice DeWitt, and it is disputed historically whether Everett really believed in the reality of many worlds. What is not disputed is Everett’s insistence that we must take quantum mechanics seriously on all scales. He thus introduced...
Chapter
All quantum theories have one thing in common: they agree that chance (or randomness) should feel at home in the theory. It is sometimes claimed that quantum randomness, or equivalently quantum probability, is irreducible, by which it is meant that there is just no way out of it. Quantum mechanical probability is expressed in Born’s statistical int...
Chapter
We have omitted a lot in our reconstruction of the current state of relativistic quantum theory. For instance, the path integral formalism that is often hailed as a manifestly relativistic version of quantum field theory while, in fact, it is merely a technical reformulation that has just as many problems. Neither did we speak about string theory a...
Chapter
Here we recall some mathematical basics of quantum mechanics about which there is no dispute. These fundamentals are equally relevant for all quantum mechanical theories (which are unfortunately—or rather, mistakenly—often referred to as interpretations). Our selection is also determined by our needs in later chapters.
Chapter
When we look in textbooks on quantum theory to find the heart of the theory, one notion in particular stands out: the observable. In older representations, observables are self-adjoint operators on the Hilbert space of a system and they are supposed to describe the properties of a system which can be observed. In more modern texts (actually already...
Chapter
Every course on quantum mechanics will at some point engage with the notion of “hidden variables”. The terminology is connected with the infamous no hidden variables theorems of von Neumann, Gleason, Kochen and Specker, and Bell, which assert that quantum mechanics does not allow for hidden variables.
Chapter
The term “collapse theory” refers to an entire class of quantum theories that replace the Schrödinger equation by a non-linear time evolution for the wave function so that the superposition principle, which leads to the measurement problem, is no longer valid. For small systems, like single atoms, the violation of the superposition principle is bar...
Chapter
We showed in the previous chapter that the Bohmian velocity of a particle cannot be measured according to ( 7.24). But by now there are many measurement experiments which report on successful measurements of Bohmian velocities. So what is going on? The answer is that these measurements are not of the form so far discussed. The new way of measuring...
Book
This book discusses the physical and mathematical foundations of modern quantum mechanics and three realistic quantum theories that John Stuart Bell called "theories without observers" because they do not merely speak about measurements but develop an objective picture of the physical world. These are Bohmian mechanics, the GRW collapse theory, and...
Article
The paper uses the concept of typicality to spell out an argument against Humean supervenience and the best system account of laws. It proves that, in a very general and robust sense, almost all possible Humean worlds have no Humean laws. They are worlds of irreducible complexity that do not allow for any systematization. After explaining typicalit...
Preprint
Full-text available
The paper addresses the debate about the empirical status of particles versus wave functions in Bohmian quantum mechanics. It thereby clarifies questions and misconceptions about the role of the particles in the measurement process, the (un)reliability of position measurements ("surrealistic trajectories"), and the limited empirical access to parti...
Preprint
Full-text available
This note clarifies some technical and conceptual details about the description of the measurement process in Bohmian mechanics and responds to a recent manuscript by Shan Gao (2019), wrongly claiming that Bohmian mechanics is inconsistent and doesn’t solve the measurement problem.
Article
The paper addresses the debate about the empirical status of particles versus wave functions in Bohmian quantum mechanics. It thereby clarifies questions and misconceptions about the role of the particles in the measurement process, the (un)reliability of position measurements ("surrealistic trajectories"), and the limited empirical access to parti...
Article
Full-text available
We discuss the no-go theorem of Frauchiger and Renner based on an “extended Wigner’s friend” thought experiment which is supposed to show that any single-world interpretation of quantum mechanics leads to inconsistent predictions if it is applicable on all scales. We show that no such inconsistency occurs if one considers a complete description of...
Article
Full-text available
The paper discusses recent proposals by Carroll and Chen, as well as Barbour, Koslowski, and Mercati to explain the (thermodynamic) arrow of time without a Past Hypothesis, i.e. the assumption of a special (low-entropy) initial state of the universe. After discussing the role of the Past Hypothesis and the controversy about its status, we explain w...
Article
Full-text available
In a recent article, Werndl and Frigg discuss the relationship between the Boltzmannian and Gibbsian framework of statistical mechanics, addressing in particular the question when equilibrium values calculated in both frameworks agree. In this paper, I address conceptual confusions that could arise from their discussion, concerning in particular th...
Preprint
We discuss the no-go theorem of Frauchiger and Renner based on an "extended Wigner's friend" thought experiment which is supposed to show that any single-world interpretation of quantum mechanics leads to inconsistent predictions if it is applicable on all scales. We show that no such inconsistency occurs if one considers a complete description of...
Preprint
In a recent paper, Charlotte Werndl and Roman Frigg discuss the relationship between the Boltzmannian and Gibbsian framework of statistical mechanics, addressing in particular the question when equilibrium values calculated in both frameworks coincide. In this comment, I point out serious flaws in their work and try to put their results into proper...
Preprint
The paper discusses and compares recent proposals by Carroll and Chen and Barbour et al. to explain the (thermodynamic) arrow of time without a Past Hypothesis, i.e. the assumption of a special (low-entropy) initial state. Defining a Boltzmann entropy for a classical gravitating universe, we argue that Newtonian gravity might actually provide examp...
Article
Full-text available
The paper provides a critical discussion of the Super-Humean view of spacetime (Huggett's regularity account) and the “minimalist ontology” in terms of Leibnizian relations and primitive matter points, recently developed by Esfeld et al. It investigates, in particular, the empirical adequacy of the proposed metaphysics, arguing that Super-Humeanism...
Preprint
Full-text available
The paper argues that far from challenging-or even refuting-Bohm's quantum theory, the no hidden-variables theorems in fact support the Bohmian ontology for quantum mechanics. The reason is that (i) all measurements come down to position measurements and (ii) Bohm's theory provides a clear and coherent explanation of the measurement outcome statist...
Article
Full-text available
The paper argues that far from challenging – or even refuting – Bohm’s quantum theory, the no-hidden-variables theorems in fact support the Bohmian ontology for quantum mechanics. The reason is that (i) all measurements come down to position measurements and (ii) Bohm’s theory provides a clear and coherent explanation of the measurement outcome sta...
Article
In a recent paper, Werndl and Frigg discuss the relationship between the Boltzmannian and Gibbsian framework of statistical mechanics, addressing in particular the question when equilibrium values calculated in both frameworks coincide. In this comment, I point out serious flaws in their work and try to put their results into proper context. I also...
Article
Full-text available
We present a probabilistic proof of the mean field limit and propagation of chaos N-particle systems in three dimensions with positive (Coulomb) or negative (Newton) 1/r potentials scaling like 1/N and an N-dependent cut-off which scales like N-1/3+ϵ\documentclass[12pt]{minimal} \usepackage{amsmath} \usepackage{wasysym} \usepackage{amsfonts} \usepa...
Article
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Using the example of classical electrodynamics, I argue that the concept of fields as mediators of particle interactions is fundamentally flawed and reflects a misguided attempt to retrieve Newtonian concepts in relativistic theories. This leads to various physical and metaphysical problems that are discussed in detail. In particular, I emphasize t...
Article
Full-text available
The paper treats the validity problem of the non-relativistic Vlasov-Poisson equation in $d\geq 2$ dimensions. It is shown that the Vlasov-Poisson dynamics can be derived as a combined mean-field and point-particle limit of an N-particle Coulomb system of rigid charges. This requires a sufficiently fast convergence of the initial empirical distribu...
Article
By means of the examples of classical and Bohmian quantum mechanics, we illustrate the well-known ideas of Boltzmann as to how one gets from laws defined for the universe as a whole to dynamical relations describing the evolution of subsystems. We explain how probabilities enter into this process, what quantum and classical probabilities have in co...
Preprint
By means of the examples of classical and Bohmian quantum mechanics, we illustrate the well-known ideas of Boltzmann as to how one gets from laws defined for the universe as a whole to dynamical relations describing the evolution of subsystems. We explain how probabilities enter into this process, what quantum and classical probabilities have in co...
Article
Full-text available
We present a microscopic derivation of the 3-dimensional relativistic Vlasov-Maxwell system as a combined mean field and point-particle limit of an $N$-particle system of rigid charges with $N$-dependent radius. The approximation holds for typical initial particle configurations, implying in particular propagation of chaos for the respective dynami...
Article
Full-text available
We present a simple model demonstrating that time-symmetric (advanced + retarded) relativistic interactions can account for statistical correlations violating the Bell inequalities while avoiding conspiracies as well as the commitment to instantaneous (direct space-like) influences. We provide an explicit statistical analysis of the model while hig...
Chapter
While our physical description of the world does not contain an objective present, it still adheres to the notion of “instants” or “instantaneous states” that appear through the formulation of physical laws as initial value problems. That these ideas survived even the revolutionary transition from classical Newtonian space–time to relativistic spac...
Article
Full-text available
The paper sets out a primitive ontology of the natural world in terms of primitive stuff, that is, stuff that has as such no physical properties at all, but that is not a bare substratum either, being individuated by metrical relations. We focus on quantum physics and employ identity-based Bohmian mechanics to illustrate this view, but point out th...
Article
Full-text available
We discuss Boltzmann's probabilistic explanation of the second law of thermodynamics providing a comprehensive presentation of what is called today the typicality account. Countering its misconception as an alternative explanation, we examine the relation between Boltzmann's H-theorem and the general typicality argument demonstrating the conceptual...
Chapter
In my commentary, I will argue that the conclusions drawn in the paper Noncommutative Causality in Algebraic Quantum Field Theory by Gábor Hofer-Szabó are incorrect. As proven by J.S. Bell, a local common causal explanation of correlations violating the Bell inequality is impossible.
Article
We present a simple model, demonstrating that time-symmetric relativistic interactions can account for correlations violating the Bell inequalities while avoiding conspiracies as well as the commitment to instantaneous influences. We emphasize the essential virtues and problems of such an account and discuss its relation to Bell's theorem.
Article
Full-text available
In my commentary, I will argue that the conclusions drawn in the paper Noncommutative causality in algebraic quantum field theory by G\'abor Hofer-Szab\'o (and similar publications) are incorrect. As proven by J.S. Bell, a local common causal explanation of correlations violating the Bell inequality is impossible.
Article
Full-text available
The article points out that the modern formulation of Bohm’s quantum theory, known as Bohmian mechanics, is committed only to particles’ positions and a law of motion. We explain how this view can avoid the open questions that the traditional view faces, according to which Bohm’s theory is committed to a wave-function that is a physical entity over...

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