The physical principles of the quantum theory

Abstract The object of this paper is to reformulate the principles of the quantum theory as a sequence of propositions which shall be either summary statements of standard experimental procedure or hypotheses concerning the results of experiment and having an immediate physical interpretation. It is shown that the standard process in micro-physics is a generalised spectral analysis, whose properties are simply expressible in symbolic form by means of projective or “idempotent” operators (Einzeloperatoren). It appears that only two hypotheses need be made and that these relate to the existence and properties of transition probabilities. From these fundamental principles, which have a direct physical significance, it is possible to deduce the subsidiary principles which form the accepted basis of the mathematical analysis of the quantum theory and which deal with the representation of quantum states and physical quantities by vectors and linear operators respectively. In this paper the emphasis is laid on the experimental process determining a state of a system and on the associated operators rather than on the state itself or the vector representing it in the system space. Projective operators, which represent actual processes of measurement, and unitary operators, which represent actual transformations of systems of measurement, are given priority over the (statistical) operators which represent physical variables. This method of representation makes the physical meaning of the theory fundamental, instead of leaving it to be extracted from a purely mathematical system of non-commutative algebra or differential equations.