By George Jaroszkiewicz
Cambridge University Press
Quantised Detector Networks (QDN) theory was invented to reduce the level of metaphysics in the application of quantum mechanics (QM), moving the focus from the system under observation to the observer and the measurement apparatuses. This approach is based on the consideration that “labstates”, i.e. the states of the system we use for observing, are the only things we can actually deal with, while we have no means to prove that the objects under study “exist” independently of observers or observations.
In this view, QM is not a theory describing objects per se, but a theory of entitlement, which means that it provides physicists with a set of rules defining what an observer is entitled to say in any particular context.
The book is organized in four parts: Basics, Applications, Prospects, and Appendices. The author provides, first of all, the formalism of QDN and then applies it to a number of experiments that show how it differs from standard quantum formalism. In the third part, the prospects for future applications of QDN are discussed, as well as the possibility of constructing a generalised theory of observation. Finally, the appendices collect collateral material referred to at various places in the book.
The aim of the author is to push the readers to look in a different way at the world they live in, to show them the cognitive traps caused by realism – i.e. the assumption that what we observe has an existence independent of our observation – and alerting them that various speculative concepts and theories discussed by some scientists do not actually have empirical basis. In other words, they cannot be experimentally tested.
