Related papers: Simplicissimus' Inquiries
This essay provides a short introduction to the ideas and potential implications of quantum physics for scholars in the arts, humanities, and social sciences. Quantum-inspired ideas pepper current discourse in all of these fields, in ways…
The widely considered assertion is that the unitarity of quantum mechanical evolution assures the preservation of information. It is even promoted in popular literature as an established fact. (Susskind, 2008) Yet, a simple chain of…
I examine the hypothesis that consciousness can be understood as a state of matter, "perceptronium", with distinctive information processing abilities. I explore five basic principles that may distinguish conscious matter from other…
An attempt to answer the question 'Can we observe galaxies that recede faster than light ?' led to a re-examination of the notions of time, distance, velocity and redshift as they occur in newtonian physics, special relativity, general…
One of the predominant challenges when engineering future quantum information processors is that large quantum systems are notoriously hard to maintain and control accurately. It is therefore of immediate practical relevance to investigate…
The possibility of using a solid medium to store few-photon laser pulses as coupled excitations between light and matter is investigated. The role of inhomogeneous broadening and nonadiabaticity are considered, and conditions governing the…
A quantum computer is a machine that can perform certain calculations much faster than a classical computer by using the laws of quantum mechanics. Quantum computers do not exist yet, because it is extremely difficult to control quantum…
The possibility to describe the laws of the Universe in a computational way seems to be correlated to a principle that the density of information is bounded. This principle, that is dual to that of a finite velocity of information, has…
We consider a basic model of digital memory where each cell is composed of a reflecting medium with two possible reflectivities. By fixing the mean number of photons irradiated over each memory cell, we show that a non-classical source of…
Although information, strictly speaking, is not a physical entity, it generally requires physical entities as its carriers, e.g., writing it down on paper, encoding it with quantum particles, or transmitting it using electro-magnetic…
More than a speculative technology, quantum computing seems to challenge our most basic intuitions about how the physical world should behave. In this thesis I show that, while some intuitions from classical computer science must be…
We attempt to describe geometry in terms of informational quantities for the universe considered as a finite ensemble of correlated quantum particles. As the main dynamical principle, we use the conservation of the sum of all kinds of…
Linear optics quantum computing (LOQC) is a leading candidate for the implementation of large scale quantum computers. Here quantum information is encoded into the quantum states of light and computation proceeds via a linear optics…
We have a lot of relation to the encoding and the Theory of Information, when considering thinking. This is a natural process and, at once, the complex thing we investigate. This always was a challenge - to understand how our mind works,…
Information is everywhere in nature which is very uncertain and unpredictable. But information, in itself, is a very ambiguous term. In this cursory write-up, we attempt to understand the formal meaning of information by quantifying…
An optical quantum memory can be broadly defined as a system capable of storing a useful quantum state through interaction with light at optical frequencies. During the last decade, intense research was devoted to their development, mostly…
We discuss the physical nature of quantum information, in particular focussing on tasks that are achievable by some physical realizations of qubits but not by others.
Information theory is a statistical theory dealing with the relative state of detectors and physical systems. Because of this physicality of information, the classical framework of Shannon needs to be extended to deal with quantum…
A system's apparent simplicity depends on whether it is represented classically or quantally. This is not so surprising, as classical and quantum physics are descriptive frameworks built on different assumptions that capture, emphasize, and…
The purpose of this article is to provide a novel approach and justification of the idea that classical physics and quantum physics can neither function nor even be conceived one without the other - in line with ideas attributed to e.g.…