Mioara Mugur-Schächter is a French-Romanian physicist, specialized in fundamental quantum mechanics, probability theory and theory of communication of information. She is also an epistemologist (methodologist) of generation of scientific knowledge. As a professor of theoretical physics at the University of Reims, she founded the Laboratory of Quantum Mechanics and Structures of Information which she directed until 1994. She is currently president of the Centre pour la Synthèse d'une Épistémologie Formalisée (CeSEF).
Born in Romania, she arrived in France in 1962 from Bucharest where she was a researcher at the Institute of Atomic Physics and lecturer at the Institute of Constructions.
In Bucharest, during the period 1957-1959, in total isolation, she established the first invalidation of the proof of John von Neumann's theorem asserting the impossibility of hidden parameters compatible with the quantum mechanical formalism, and she managed to send the manuscript, in English, to Louis de Broglie. Once arrived France she transformed the invalidation of von Neumann's theorem into a PhD thesis under the direction of Louis de Broglie. This thesis was published by Gauthier Villar in 1964 in the collection "Les Grands Problèmes des Sciences", as a book prefaced by Louis de Broglie and titled "Étude du caractère complet de la théorie quantique".
- Her research in France initially continued in a critical manner with the invalidation of Eugene Wigner's theorem on the impossibility of joint probabilities of position and momentum, compatible with the quantum mechanical formalism. This work was published in Foundations of Science on the recommendation of Wigner himself (see the list of works).
- In an international colloquium for the celebration of the 100th anniversary of Einstein's birth, at the Collège de France, she publicly challenged the structure of a theorem in Bell's work on non-locality (see list of works).
- In the 1980s she constructed a "Functional of Opacity of a Statistic with respect to the Law of Probability which is acting".
- In 1994 she founded, with a small group of excellence, the Centre pour la Synthèse d'une Epistémologie Formalisée (CeSEF). The founding Manifesto ("Les Leçons de la Mécanique Quantique") was published in "le Débat", Gallimard. The activities of CeSEF group led to the publication in 2002 of a collective book, "Quantum Mechanics, Mathematica, Cognition and Action" (Kluwer Academic Press, M. Mugur-Schächter &van der Merwe, edts.). Mugur-Schächter's own contribution was reprinted in Foundations of Science, 2002, and then developed in a separate book, "Sur le Tissage des Connaissances" (Lavoisier, 2006), where the Method of Relativised Conceptualisation (MRC) is for the first time constructed and discussed in detail and with rigour.
- In 2013 Mugur-Schächter undertook a great unifying constructive action. In that year she published the first version of an 'Infra-Mécanique Quantique' (Dianoïa-Presses Universitaires), taken up and developed in a book by Presses Universitaires Européennes "Infra-Mécanique Quantique Indéterminisme, Non-localité" in 2017. The construct called Infra-Quantum Mechanics (IQM) is conceived as a structure of reference and immersion for any intelligible mathematical representation of microstates.
- In December 2023, 10 years later, she has closed a final work of Synthesis which can be found on ResearchGate. This work contains (1) an enriched variant of the General Method of Relativised Conceptualisation (MRC); (2) an enriched variant of the Infra-(Quantum Mechanics) in which Bell's non-locality theorem is strictly invalidated, and it appears that a modern microphysics which studies physical entities that cannot be observed by humans cannot be predictive. (3) In addition, the above-mentioned synthesis - in consequence of the correct understanding of Gleason's theorem on contextuality - finally contains a perfectly intelligible Second Quantum Mechanics (QM2), rooted in the infinite and unknowable physical reality, and constructed "Bottom-up" from A to Z.
The 2023 variant of the Method of Relativised Conceptualisation (MRC) incorporates a Factual Theory of Probability in which a profound unification is achieved between "genetic logic", "genetic probabilities", Shannon's theory of Communication of Information, Karl Popper's concept of Propensity, and Edgar Morin's concept of Complexity. This last construct poses an independent interest for any modern problem that includes factual statistical knowledge.