Nelson's Stochastic Mechanics: Measurement, Nonlocality, and the Classical Limit

Quantum Physics [Submitted on 3 Apr 2026] Nelson's Stochastic Mechanics: Measurement, Nonlocality, and the Classical Limit Partha Ghose Nelson's stochastic mechanics may be understood as a stochastic underpinning, or reconstruction, of nonrelativistic quantum mechanics, once the diffusion scale is fixed by \hbar and the admissible states are restricted by the usual single-valuedness condition on the wavefunction. In this note I briefly indicate what this route achieves and why it remains conceptually attractive. Three advantages are emphasized. First, it supplies a clear configuration-space stochastic picture of the underlying processes. Second, it offers a markedly different perspective on measurement and nonlocality: in particular, collapse need not be treated as an extra axiom, and the nonlocality associated with entangled states is softened relative to the deterministic Bohmian guidance picture. Third, by tying quantumness to a diffusion scale, it naturally suggests a continuum of physical descriptions ranging from the strictly classical to the strictly quantum-mechanical regime. I conclude by proposing a natural distance scale in stochastic mechanics and examining its implications for testing possible limits of Bell correlations. Comments: 6 pages, no figures Subjects: Quantum Physics (quant-ph) Cite as: arXiv:2604.03214 [quant-ph]   (or arXiv:2604.03214v1 [quant-ph] for this version)   https://doi.org/10.48550/arXiv.2604.03214 Focus to learn more Submission history From: Partha Ghose Professor [view email] [v1] Fri, 3 Apr 2026 17:43:47 UTC (8 KB) Access Paper: HTML (experimental) view license Current browse context: quant-ph < prev   |   next > new | recent | 2026-04 References & Citations INSPIRE HEP NASA ADS Google Scholar Semantic Scholar Export BibTeX Citation Bookmark Bibliographic Tools Bibliographic and Citation Tools Bibliographic Explorer Toggle Bibliographic Explorer (What is the Explorer?) Connected Papers Toggle Connected Papers (What is Connected Papers?) Litmaps Toggle Litmaps (What is Litmaps?) scite.ai Toggle scite Smart Citations (What are Smart Citations?) Code, Data, Media Demos Related Papers About arXivLabs Which authors of this paper are endorsers? | Disable MathJax (What is MathJax?)