Editorial: Introduction and Motivations

If you google for “open system” you get plenty of information about security services and consulting firms, as well as IT companies and industries. They explain about firewalls, vpn, intrusion detection, security standards, violations, protection of corporate assets, anti-spam, anti-virus, authentication, service and maintenance, proxy, and audits. Their mission is “to build and foster relationships with clients by providing dedicated, passionate and unrivaled service”, to design “open and timely communications”, and to this end some of them provide a full range of staffing services and solutions. Their main objective is to make one feel secure. Openness to the external world is viewed as a threat. We pretend to be open and to like open systems, but in fact we do not. We prefer closed systems, as they are more controllable and certainly easier to deal with. Closed systems are a cradle. I wonder whether it is not the same with quantum mechanics. Quantum mechanics originally followed the typical “Western” approach to science, based on Greek philosophy: a system is something separated from the rest of the universe and when the rest of the universe interacts with it we invent all sorts of things to describe these “interactions”. We then go back to the system and analyze it. In the worst case, “external”, God-given forces are time-dependent. Divide and conquer. The gentle rocking of the cradle of closed Hamiltonian systems helped us relax peacefully for more than 50 years. Then Gorini, Kossakowski, Lindblad and Sudarshan woke us up [1, 2, 3]. Not only closed quantum systems do not exist, but the dynamical laws that govern (existing) open quantum