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# Relational quantum mechanics

## Details

**Authors** Rovelli, Carlo

**Year** 1996

**Publisher** International Journal of Theoretical Physics

**Kind of work** article

**Discipline** Physics

**Secondary disciplines** Philosophy

**Applied** false

[Read it at the publisher](https://doi.org/10.1007/bf02302261) 
10.1007/bf02302261

## In authors' words

### What they set out to do (purpose)

To resolve the unease about the measurement problem by dropping the assumption that a system's state is observer-independent.

### How they did it (methods)

A theoretical derivation of quantum mechanics from two information-theoretic postulates, plus a third superposition postulate, with replies to alternative interpretations.

### What they found (results)

The author argues that different observers can give different, equally correct accounts of the same sequence of events, so no observer-independent state exists. He treats quantum mechanics as a complete theory of the information systems have about one another, leaves its predictions unchanged, and admits that the two postulates alone do not recover the full formalism.

## Commentary

### In short

The author argues that the state of a quantum system exists only relative to another system, and that quantum mechanics describes the information systems hold about each other.

### Response

The central claim is that a system's state depends on the observer's position, with an observer inside the interaction and an outside observer describing the same events differently (P). Values are defined as correlations between systems (R). Caveats: physics is already well represented on the site, the paper's perspective-dependence is tied to the quantum measurement problem and should not be generalized without argument, and the final section of the arXiv text was not read.

**Patterns it shows** R, P

Formal proof or model

**Added** 2026-10-12

**How to cite this** Rovelli, Carlo (1996). Relational quantum mechanics. International Journal of Theoretical Physics.