đź“Ť Politecnico di Torino - đź“… June-July 2026
The QubiTO team is pleased to invite you to a seminar series on the foundations of quantum mechanics. Below you’ll find the abstracts. The seminars will be held in English and will last approximately one hour, followed by a discussion.
Einstein's Arguments against the Completeness of Quantum Mechanics
June 10th • 19:00 • Room 1S
Speaker: Prof. Marco Giovanelli (UniTo)
This seminar will offer a historical overview of Einstein’s arguments against the completeness of quantum mechanics from the mid-1930s to the mid-1950s. It will be shown that these arguments take the form of reductio arguments: if the quantum-mechanical description is complete, one must accept consequences that appear physically unacceptable.
Two versions of this strategy will be discussed, according to the consequence at stake. Reality arguments claim that completeness would force us to deny definite real states even to macroscopic systems before measurement. Separability arguments claim that completeness would make the state of one system depend on a measurement performed on another, spatially separated system.
Although the literature has generally emphasized the latter in connection with the EPR argument, we argue that Einstein’s central concern is more clearly expressed by the former. Separability arguments functioned as a detour, allowing Einstein to circumvent the positivist denial that questions about the real state of a system before measurement are meaningful.
Once Einstein recognized the limits of this indirect strategy, his later writings returned to the reality argument, which addressed more directly his fundamental concern: microscopic systems, no less than macroscopic ones, must possess definite real states independently of observation, since no sharp boundary can be drawn between atomic objects and macroscopic bodies.
Entanglement, Bell inequalities and our vision of the world
June 26th • 18:00 • Room 1S
Speaker: Prof. Marco Genovese (INRiM)
Entanglement is the characteristic trait of quantum mechanics and has been at the basis of most of the debate on the foundations of quantum mechanics, becoming more recently also a fundamental resource for the second quantum technological revolution.
Starting from 1935, the EPR paper raised the question of whether the world is truly probabilistic or whether a more general deterministic theory exists, with quantum mechanics as an approximation. A fundamental contribution was the 1964 Bell theorem, which demonstrated that non-local hidden variable theory (LHVT) and quantum mechanics do not yield identical predictions for experiments on correlations of entangled states.
This theoretical paper started a long experimental work that culminated with 2015 experiments falsifying, without any possible loophole, LHVTs.
In this talk, prof. Marco Genovese (INRiM) will present these issues, discussing the impact on our vision of the universe.
Making sense of the wave function
July 10th • 18:00 • Room 1S
Speaker: Dr. Davide Romano (UniVr)
Dr. Davide Romano (University of Verona) will discuss Bohmian mechanics as a realist approach to quantum mechanics, and the nature of the wave function
