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arXiv · 2510.02138

Realism and the Inequivalence of the Two Quantum Pictures

Charles Alexandre Bédard
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Abstract

The standard claim that the Schr\"odinger 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 Schr\"odinger 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 Schr\"odinger 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 Schr\"odinger framework does not explain fully locally.

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Charles Alexandre Bédard. 2025-10-02. Realism and the Inequivalence of the Two Quantum Pictures. https://arxiv.org/abs/2510.02138

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