Related papers: Physics as Information Processing
The experience from Quantum Information has lead us to look at Quantum Theory (QT) and the whole Physics from a different angle. The information-theoretical paradigm---"It from Bit'---prophesied by John Archibald Wheeler is relentlessly…
Quantum theory can be derived from purely informational principles. Five elementary axioms-causality, perfect distinguishability, ideal compression, local distinguishability, and pure conditioning-define a broad class of theories of…
Quantum mechanics, information theory, and relativity theory are the basic foundations of theoretical physics. The acquisition of information from a quantum system is the interface of classical and quantum physics. Essential tools for its…
David Finkelstein was very fond of the new information-theoretic paradigm of physics advocated by John Archibald Wheeler and Richard Feynman. Only recently, however, the paradigm has concretely shown its full power, with the derivation of…
We give a condensed and accessible summary of a recent derivation of quantum theory from information-theoretic principles, and use it to study the consequences of this and other reconstructions for our conceptual understanding of the…
After more than a century since its birth, Quantum Theory still eludes our understanding. If asked to describe it, we have to resort to abstract and ad hoc principles about complex Hilbert spaces. How is it possible that a fundamental…
In this paper we derive the complex Hilbert space formalism of quantum theory from four simple information theoretic axioms. It is shown that quantum theory is the only non classical probabilistic theory satisfying the following axioms:…
A preliminary model of meaningful quanta of information arising from the quantum vacuum, and giving rise to the elementary quantum fields, is presented. We attempt to establish an equivalence of information and physical action, with the…
Does information play a significant role in the foundations of physics? Information is the abstraction that allows us to refer to the states of systems when we choose to ignore the systems themselves. This is only possible in very…
I suggest that the common unease with taking quantum mechanics as a fundamental description of nature (the "measurement problem") could derive from the use of an incorrect notion, as the unease with the Lorentz transformations before…
Many recent results suggest that quantum theory is about information, and that quantum theory is best understood as arising from principles concerning information and information processing. At the same time, by far the simplest version of…
We reformulate the problem of the "interpretation of quantum mechanics" as the problem of DERIVING the quantum mechanical formalism from a set of simple physical postulates. We suggest that the common unease with taking quantum mechanics as…
This essay considers a simple model of observers that are influenced by the world around them. Consistent quantification of information about such influences results in a great deal of familiar physics. The end result is a new perspective…
In modern quantum information theory one deals with an idealized situation when the spacetime dependence of quantum phenomena is neglected. However the transmission and processing of (quantum) information is a physical process in spacetime.…
Quantum information science is a source of task-related axioms whose consequences can be explored in general settings encompassing quantum mechanics, classical theory, and more. Quantum states are compendia of probabilities for the outcomes…
It is suggested that quantum mechanics is not fundamental but emerges from classical information theory applied to causal horizons. The path integral quantization and quantum randomness can be derived by considering information loss of…
I argue that quantum mechanics is fundamentally a theory about the representation and manipulation of information, not a theory about the mechanics of nonclassical waves or particles. The notion of quantum information is to be understood as…
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…
At this point in time, two major areas of physics, statistical mechanics and quantum mechanics, rest on the foundations of probability and entropy. The last century saw several significant fundamental advances in our understanding of the…
This work is a discussion on the concept of information. We define here information as an abstraction that is able to be copied. We consider the connection between the process of copying information in quantum systems and the emergence of…