2025/10/02 by Charles Alexandre Bédard, Bédard, Charles Alexandre
Mathematics · Physics and Astronomy · #Benford’s Law and Fraud Detection #FOS: Physical sciences #Quantum Mechanics and Applications #Quantum Physics (quant-ph)
paper · pdf · doi:10.48550/arxiv.2510.02138
openalex publication_date 2025/10/02 · openalex created_date 2025/10/10 · openalex updated_date 2026/07/28
The standard claim that the Schrödinger and Heisenberg pictures of quantum mechanics are equivalent rests on the fact that they yield identical empirical predictions. This equivalence therefore assumes the instrumentalist worldview in which theories serve only as tools for prediction. Under scientific realism, by contrast, theories aim to describe reality. Whereas the Schrödinger picture posits a time-evolving wave function, the Heisenberg picture posits so-called descriptors, time-evolving generators of the algebra of observables. These two structures are non-isomorphic: descriptors surject onto but do not reduce to the Schrödinger state. Hence, under realism, the pictures are inequivalent. I argue that this inequivalence marks an opening toward a richer, separable ontology for quantum theory. On explanatory grounds, descriptors provide genuinely local accounts of superdense coding, teleportation, branching, and Bell inequality violations -- phenomena that the Schrödinger framework does not explain fully locally.