Constantin Piron

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Constantin Piron (* 1932 in Paris ; † May 9, 2012 in Lausanne ) was a Belgian mathematical physicist who worked in Switzerland and who dealt with the fundamentals of quantum mechanics .

Life

Piron's mother was Belgian and, as a theoretical physicist, a student of Théophile de Donder . She specialized in general relativity and field theories and was in Paris to do her PhD at the Joliot-Curie Laboratory, but then got married. From 1939 he attended the Cours Saint Louis school in Paris, but had to go into hiding with his parents in Burgundy after the German occupation. He did not graduate from school and although he successfully passed the entrance exams at EPFL in Lausanne, he was not officially registered as a student. That happened only a few weeks before his doctorate and even then he was supervising the examination of the doctoral students of the theoretical physicist ECG Stueckelberg . In 1956 he became an assistant at the chair for descriptive geometry in Lausanne, where he studied the works of the differential geometer Elie Cartan , and from 1957 to 1965 he was in the laboratory for experimental nuclear physics and was from 1958 to 1964 assistant to Stueckelberg. From 1961 to 1966 he also worked with Josef-Maria Jauch .

Piron received his doctorate in 1963 in Lausanne with Josef-Maria Jauch (and ECG Stueckelberg) with a dissertation on axioms of quantum theory. In his dissertation, he proved his theorem in the axiomatic foundation of quantum mechanics. In 1969 he became an assistant professor at the University of Geneva with a full professorship from 1974 and was retired in 2000.

He is known for contributions to quantum logic , particularly his basic notation from 1963/64. He considered the set L of operational propositions (that is, testable by experiments with yes / no answers) for a physical system and five axioms for this. From this he deduced that L is isomorphic to the set of closed subspaces of a generalized Hilbert space. This was an important step in the program initiated by John von Neumann and Garrett Birkhoff in 1936 and pursued by George Mackey to lay the foundations of quantum mechanics on order structures in Hilbert spaces. As already recognized by Neumann and Birkhoff, a generalized logic (theory of associations instead of Boolean logic ) is necessary because the distributive law does not apply due to the uncertainty relation.

The No Go Theorem by Jauch and Piron is an analogue to the No Go Theorem by John von Neumann about the existence of theories with hidden variables in the context of quantum logic.

He also studied metric field theories of gravity based on ideas from Elie Cartan.

Although he was known as a representative of quantum logic, with a monograph published in 1976, he maintained a skeptical attitude both in the fundamentals of quantum mechanics and in relation to (general) relativity.

literature

  • Diederik Aerts: Constantin Piron at sixty-plus: Continuing a quest for the understanding of fundamental physical theories and the pursuit of their elaboration, Foundations of Physics, Volume 24, 1997, pp. 1107–1111.

Fonts

  • Axiomatique Quantique, Helvetica Physica Acta, Volume 37, 1964, 439-468.
  • with Gérard Emch : Symmetry in quantum theory, J. Math. Phys., Volume 4, 1963, pp. 469-473.
  • Foundations of Quantum Mechanics, Benjamin 1976
  • Mécanique quantique: bases et applications, Presses polytechniques et universitaires romandes, 1990
  • Méthodes quantiques: Champs, N-corps, diffusion, Presses polytechniques et universitaires romandes 2005
  • New Einstein Gravitation, Foundations of Physics, Volume 35, 2005, pp. 1643-1651.
  • Introduction à la Physique Quantique, 2002, Arxiv
  • Field theory revisited, Conference New Insights in Quantum Mechanics, Goslar 1998, Arxiv Preprint 2002
  • Quantum Theory without Quantification, Helv. Phys. Acta, Vol. 69, 1995, pp. 694-701, Arxiv
  • Time, relativity and quantum theory, in: AO Barut, New Frontiers in Quantum Electrodynamics and Quantum Optics, Plenum Press 1990
  • Quanta and relativity: two failed revolutions, in D. Aerts, J. Broekaert, E. Mathijs, Einstein meets Magritte, an interdisciplinary reflection, Kluwer 1999

Web links

Individual evidence

  1. ↑ Constantin Piron in the Mathematics Genealogy Project (English)Template: MathGenealogyProject / Maintenance / id used
  2. ↑ L is a complete, atomic, irreducible and orthomodular lattice with an atomic covering law. For technical definitions, see, for example, Alexander Wilce, Quantum Logic and Probability Theory, Stanford Encyclopedia of Philosophy 2012
  3. ↑ Jauch, Piron, Can hidden variables be excluded in quantum mechanics?, Helvetica Physica Acta, Volume 36, 1963, pp. 827-837, CERN Preprint, pdf
personal data
SURNAME Piron, Constantin
BRIEF DESCRIPTION Belgian physicist
DATE OF BIRTH 1932
PLACE OF BIRTH Paris
DATE OF DEATH May 9, 2012
Place of death Lausanne