Macroscopic realism and spatiotemporal continuity

Macroscopic realism, as introduced by Leggett and Garg, is the world view in which properties of macroscopic systems exist independent of and are not influenced by measurement. Motivated by classical physical laws such as Newtonian mechanics or Maxwell's electrodynamics, in this work we add the restrictive postulate that the observables of macroscopic objects are evolved continuously through space and time. Quantum theory violates both macroscopic realism and the continuity assumption. While decoherence or collapse models (e.g. due to a universal noise background or gravitational self energy) can restore macroscopic realism, we show that a continuous spatiotemporal description does not become possible in general. This shines new light on the question how the classical world arises out of the quantum realm.

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