Related papers: On The Arrow of Time
Feynman's light microscope invites us to reconsider what we thought we knew about quantum reality. Rather than invoking wavefunction collapse to predict the loss of fringes in a monitored interferometer, Feynman analyzes the problem in…
The article explores challenges presented by revelations in physics and the questions they provoke concerning reality. It sheds light on the disparity between the indefinite nature of quantum reality and our perception of classical reality.…
Quantum information theory is the study of the achievable limits of information processing within quantum mechanics. Many different types of information can be accommodated within quantum mechanics, including classical information, coherent…
An analysis of classical mechanics in a complex extension of phase space shows that a particle in such a space can behave in a way redolant of quantum mechanics; additional degrees of freedom permit 'tunnelling' without recourse to…
The arrow of time is an irreversible phenomenon for a system of particles undergoing reversible dynamics. Since the time of Boltzmann to this day, the arrow of time has led to debate and research. However, the enormous growth of…
Quantum theory depends on an external classical time, and there ought to exist an equivalent reformulation of the theory which does not depend on such a time. The demand for the existence of such a reformulation suggests that quantum theory…
Quantum mechanics can seem like a departure from everyday experience of the physical world, but constructivist theories assert that learners build new ideas from their existing ones. To explore how students can navigate this tension, we…
"Ever since the advent of modern quantum mechanics in the late 1920's, the idea has been prevalent that the classical laws of probability cease, in some sense, to be valid in the new theory. [...] The primary object of this presentation is…
Classical and quantum information theory are simply explained. To be more specific it is clarified why Shannon entropy is used as measure of classical information and after a brief review of quantum mechanics it is possible to demonstrate…
The concept of duality reflects a link between two seemingly different physical objects. An example in quantum mechanics is a situation where the spectra (or their parts) of two Hamiltonians go into each other under a certain…
The fundamental dynamics of quantum particles is neutral with respect to the arrow of time. And yet, our experiments are not: we observe quantum systems evolving from the past to the future, but not the other way round. A fundamental…
Quantum computers take advantage of interfering quantum alternatives in order to handle problems that might be too time consuming with algorithms based on classical logic. Developing quantum computers requires new ways of thinking beyond…
Feynman described the double slit experiment as "a phenomenon which is impossible, absolutely impossible, to explain in any classical way and which has in it the heart of quantum mechanics". The double slit experiment, performed one photon…
By considering (non-relativistic) quantum mechanics as it is done in practice in particular in condensed-matter physics, it is argued that a deterministic, unitary time evolution within a chosen Hilbert space always has a limited scope,…
This paper relates both to the metaphysics of probability and to the physics of time asymmetry. Using the formalism of decoherent histories, it investigates whether intuitions about intrinsic time directedness that are often associated with…
We suggest an interpretation of quantum mechanics, inspired by the ideas of Aharonov et al. of a time-symmetric description of quantum theory. We show that a special final boundary condition for the Universe, may be consistently defined as…
All measurable predictions of classical mechanics can be reproduced from a quantum-like interpretation of a nonlinear Schrodinger equation. The key observation leading to classical physics is the fact that a wave function that satisfies a…
In this paper and a companion paper, we attempt to systematically investigate the possibility that the concept of information may enable a derivation of the quantum formalism from a set of physically comprehensible postulates. To do so, we…
A most simple theoretical argument is given in order to explain the quantitative estimate of the effect of collisional decoherence in matter-wave interferometry. The argument highlights the relevance of quantum and classical features in the…
Effective classicality of a property of a quantum system can be defined using redundancy of its record in the environment. This allows quantum physics to approximate the situation encountered in the classical world: The information about a…