On the Probabilistic Nature of Quantum Mechanics and the Notion of Closed Systems

The notion of “closed systems” in Quantum Mechanics is discussed. For this purpose, we study two models of a quantum mechanical system P spatially far separated from the “rest of the universe” Q. Under reasonable assumptions on the interaction between P and Q, we show that the system P behaves as a closed system if the initial state of P ∨ Q belongs to a large class of states, including ones exhibiting entanglement between P and Q. We use our results to illustrate the non-deterministic nature of quantum mechanics. Studying a specific example, we show that assigning an initial state and a unitary time evolution to a quantum system is generally not sufficient to predict the results of a measurement with certainty.