Nicholas Harrigan Created 2026-10-24 Updated 2026-11-05
A theoretical physicist who coauthored a classification of interpretations through their underlying-state distributions. With Robert Spekkens, he distinguished psi-epistemic models, which permit overlap between distributions for distinct pure quantum states, from psi-ontic models, which forbid it. The framework makes arguments about what a wave function represents mathematically explicit, and helps state the assumptions behind later impossibility theorems.[ref]