Related papers: Toy Models for Retrocausality
Causality has been often confused with the notion of determinism. It is mandatory to separate the two notions in view of the debate about quantum foundations. Quantum theory provides an example of causal not-deterministic theory. Here we…
Formalisms based on quantum theory have been used in Cognitive Science for decades due to their descriptive features. A quantum-like (QL) approach provides descriptive features such as state superposition and probabilistic interference…
This paper is a pedagogical yet critical introduction to the quantum description of unstable systems, mostly at the level of a graduate quantum mechanics course. Quantum decays appear in many different fields of physics, and their…
Quantum theory's irreducible empirical core is a probability calculus. While it presupposes the events to which (and on the basis of which) it serves to assign probabilities, and therefore cannot account for their occurrence, it has to be…
We study a quantum mechanical toy model that mimics some features of a quenched phase transition. Both by virtue of a time-dependent Hamiltonian or by changing the temperature of the bath we are able to show that even after classicalization…
It is difficult to extract reliable criteria for causal locality from the limited ingredients found in textbook quantum theory. In the end, Bell humbly warned that his eponymous theorem was based on criteria that "should be viewed with the…
All natural things process and transform information. They receive environmental information as input, and transform it into appropriate output responses. Much of science is dedicated to building models of such systems -- algorithmic…
The quantum theory of a harmonic oscillator with a time dependent frequency arises in several important physical problems, especially in the study of quantum field theory in an external background. While the mathematics of this system is…
Account of a system may depend on available methods of gaining information. We discuss a simple discrete system whose description is affected by a specific model of measurement and transformations. It is shown that the limited means of…
We investigate the class of physical theories with the same local structure as quantum theory, but a potentially different global structure. It has previously been shown that any bipartite correlations generated by such a theory must be…
Quantum games have proposed a new point of view for the solution of the classical problems and dilemmas in game theory. Certain quantization relationships can be proposed with the objective that a game can be generalized into a quantum…
Theories including a collapse mechanism have been presented various years ago. They are based on a modification of standard quantum mechanics in which nonlinear and stochastic terms are added to the evolution equation. Their principal…
Quantum theory can be viewed as a generalization of classical probability theory, but the analogy as it has been developed so far is not complete. Whereas the manner in which inferences are made in classical probability theory is…
We show that quantum theory allows for transformations of black boxes that cannot be realized by inserting the input black boxes within a circuit in a pre-defined causal order. The simplest example of such a transformation is the classical…
The long lasting discussion on the completeness of quantum theory (QT) has not yet come to an end. The discussion is impeded by the lack of a clear understanding of what makes up the contents of a theory of physics in general and of QT…
The identification of causal relations is a cornerstone of the scientific method. Traditional approaches to this task are based on classical statistics. However, such classical approaches do not apply in the quantum domain, where a broader…
The Causal Set approach to quantum gravity asserts that spacetime, at its smallest length scale, has a discrete structure. This discrete structure takes the form of a locally finite order relation, where the order, corresponding with the…
We provide two mathematical descriptions of Spekkens's toy qubit theory, an inductively one in terms of a small set of generators, as well as an explicit closed form description. It is a subcategory MSpek of the category of finite sets,…
The author's attempt to construct a local causal model of quantum theory (QT) that includes quantum field theory (QFT) resulted in the identification of "quantum objects" as the elementary units of causality and locality. Quantum objects…
A real two-particle experiment is proposed in which one of the particles undergoes two successive impacts on beam-splitters. It is shown that the standard quantum mechanical superposition principle implies the possibility of influences…