Conservation laws and the foundations of quantum mechanics
10 Citations•2023•
Y. Aharonov, Sandu Popescu, D. Rohrlich
Proceedings of the National Academy of Sciences of the United States of America
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Abstract
Significance Conservation laws are some of the most important laws of physics. Having their origin in the symmetries of nature, conservation laws are present in all our physical theories. There are, however, significant differences between what conservation laws mean in these various theories. In quantum mechanics, which is a theory that is nondeterministic at a fundamental level, the conservation laws, as they are standardly formulated, do not refer to individual experiments but only to the statistics over a large ensemble of repeated identical experiments. Here, we take a step toward extending quantum conservation laws to individual cases.