Italian researchers involved in different aspects of the foundations and history of quantum mechanics are brought together in an interdisciplinary debate in this text. The book presents an overview of the state of Italian work in the field and of the open problems that still exist in the foundations of the theory. Physicists, logicians, mathematicians and epistemologists whose research concerns the historical analysis of quantum mechanics may find this text to be useful reading.

This volume provides a sample of the present research on the foundations of quantum mechanics and related topics by collecting the papers of the Italian scholars who attended the conference entitled "The Foundations of Quantum Mechanics -- Historical Analysis and Open Questions" (Lecce, 1998). The perspective of the book is interdisciplinary, and hence philosophical, historical and technical papers are gathered together so as to allow the reader to compare different viewpoints and cultural approaches. Most of the papers confront, directly or indirectly, the objectivity problem, taking into account the positions of the founders of QM or more recent developments. More specifically, the technical papers in the book pay special attention to the interpretation of the experiments on Bell's inequalities and to decoherence theory, but topics on unsharp QM, the consistent-history approach, quantum probability and alternative theories are also discussed. Furthermore, a number of historical and philosophical papers are devoted to Planck's Weyl's and Pauli's thought, but topics such as quantum ontology, predictivity of quantum laws, etc., are also treated.

In The Foundations of Quantum Mechanics - Historical Analysis and Open Questions, leading Italian researchers involved in different aspects of the foundations and history of quantum mechanics are brought together in an interdisciplinary debate. The book therefore presents an invaluable overview of the state of Italian work in the field at this moment, and of the open problems that still exist in the foundations of the theory. Audience: Physicists, logicians, mathematicians and epistemologists whose research concerns the historical analysis of quantum mechanics.