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Summary: Foundations of quantum physics: a general
realistic and operational approach
Diederik Aerts
FUND and CLEA,
Brussels Free University, Krijgskundestraat 33,
1160 Brussels, Belgium,
e-mail: diraerts@vub.ac.be
Abstract
We present a general formalism with the aim of describing the situa-
tion of an entity, how it is, how it reacts to experiments, how we can
make statistics with it, and how it `changes' under the influence of the
rest of the universe. Therefore we base our formalism on the following
basic notions: (1) the states of the entity; they describe the modes of
being of the entity, (2) the experiments that can be performed on the
entity; they describe how we act upon and collect knowledge about the
entity, (3) the probabilities; they describe our repeated experiments and
the statistics of these repeated experiments, (4) the symmetries; they de-
scribe the interactions of the entity with the external world without being
experimented upon. Starting from these basic notions we formulate the
necessary derived notions: mixed states, mixed experiments and events,
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