Philippe Grangier, Alexia Auffèves (2018), Philosophical Transactions of the Royal Society A 376(2123):20170322 (online 2018-05-28), discussion-meeting issue “Foundations of quantum mechanics and their impact on contemporary society”; arXiv preprint first — ARXIV-1804.04807
Key takeaways
- Within the Contexts-Systems-Modalities ontology, quantum randomness is ontological, not epistemic. It comes from the mismatch between an elementary system’s discrete (quantized) exclusive modalities and the continuously variable state of its classical context, and adding that continuity condition yields Born-rule, unistochastic probabilities.
Seeded from the abstract and a skim, before the reading in NOTE-044. What follows is what the work says about itself.
Quantum randomness is often called ontological and classical randomness epistemological, but what quantization and discreteness contribute to the difference has seldom been addressed. The authors answer within their “contextual objectivity” ontology (CSM), where quantum randomness arises from contextuality together with quantization. They argue this changes what quantum theory is for. In particular, it undercuts reductionist programmes that try to derive the classical world from many quantum systems. A second part treats quantum physics and thermodynamics as two theories of randomness and traces their mutual influence. It ends with technological uses of quantum randomness in quantum thermodynamics.
Standing in the record
Filed from the survey of 2026-09-25 of work the anthology set aside as out of scope (tier C): 470 seconds of active reading over 2 sessions in the papers-feed tracker. It was filed Deferred, unread. NOTE-044 is the close reading of 2026-09-25, and it placed the work: Active — a short, equation-free position paper whose one argument of its own is an informal N = 2 reductio; read it for the position, and read the derivation it cites — Auffèves & Grangier, Sci. Rep. 2017 (arXiv 1610.06164) and arXiv 1801.01398, neither held here — for the result.
When seeded, before the reading in NOTE-044, the entry gave a priority for a deeper reading: low — Owner time is moderate (t=470, n=2). The short paper is well captured by the skim, and the substance lives in the cited CSM papers.
What the seeding asked a deeper reading to check (NOTE-044 is that reading):
- It is the Grangier–Auffèves CSM programme in brief. Its reliance on unistochastic transition matrices is a direct point of contact with Barandes’ stochastic-quantum correspondence (c15), and a joint reading could compare the two routes to Born-rule probabilities.
- The derivation of quantum theory from (i)–(iii) is only cited, not reproduced. A deeper reading needs refs [14, 15] (Auffèves & Grangier, Sci. Rep. 2017, and related papers).
- The anti-reductionist claim, that the classical world cannot emerge from many quantum systems, is strong and should be checked against decoherence-based accounts.
Access when seeded: Crossref metadata and abstract for the DOI (online 2018-05-28, print 2018-07-13). The Royal Society PDF URL returned an HTML page, not the paper. I read the full text from the arXiv preprint 1804.04807v1 (13 Apr 2018, 9 pp., “will appear in Philosophical Transaction A”): introduction, “Contextual objectivity”, “Randomness in a contextual world”, “Theories of randomness: thermodynamics vs quantum physics” and the conclusion. I did not compare it with the typeset version. The survey notes 4 feed rows merged into this one work.