Realism and the Inequivalence of the Two Quantum Pictures

Abstract: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.

arXiv:2510.02138 [quant-ph]

(or arXiv:2510.02138v2 [quant-ph] for this version)

https://doi.org/10.48550/arXiv.2510.02138 Focus to learn more arXiv-issued DOI via DataCite

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