English

Is Quantum Mechanics Falsifiable? A computational perspective on the foundations of Quantum Mechanics

Quantum Physics 2012-06-19 v1

Abstract

Quantum computation teaches us that quantum mechanics exhibits exponential complexity. We argue that the standard scientific paradigm of "predict and verify" cannot be applied to testing quantum mechanics in this limit of high complexity. We describe how QM can be tested in this regime by extending the usual scientific paradigm to include {\it interactive experiments}.

Keywords

Cite

@article{arxiv.1206.3686,
  title  = {Is Quantum Mechanics Falsifiable? A computational perspective on the foundations of Quantum Mechanics},
  author = {Dorit Aharonov and Umesh Vazirani},
  journal= {arXiv preprint arXiv:1206.3686},
  year   = {2012}
}

Comments

12 pages, no figures. This paper is to appear in the Philosophy of Science anthology "Computability: Godel, Turing, Church, and beyond", Editors: Copeland, Posy, Shagrir, MIT press, 2012