Related papers: Reality is both digital and analog
It is brought forward that viable theories of the physical world that have no variable at all that can play the role of time, do not exist; some notion of time is one of the very first ingredients a candidate theory should possess. Almost…
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…
Time evolution of quantum systems is of interest in physics, in chemistry, and, more recently, in computer science. Quantum computers are suggested as one route to propagating quantum systems far more efficiently than ordinary numerical…
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…
Over the past 25 years, I have been involved in some intriguing developments in the foundations of physics, exploring the quantum reality problem, the relationship between quantum theory and gravity and the interplay between consciousness…
In physics, there is the prevailing intuition that we are part of a unique external world, and that the goal of physics is to understand and describe this world. This assumption of the fundamentality of objective reality is often seen as a…
How can relevant information be extracted from a quantum process? In many situations, only some part of the total information content produced by an information source is useful. Can one then find an efficient encoding, in the sense of…
This paper looks at the intersection of algorithmic information theory and physics, namely quantum mechanics, thermodynamics, and black holes. We discuss theorems which characterize the barrier between the quantum world and the classical…
Antiparticles may be interpreted as ordinary particles travelling backwards in time and the two descriptions are considered equivalent, at least in special relativity and relativistic quantum mechanics. It is suggested that, vice versa, the…
Quantum cosmology offers a unique stage to address questions of time related to its underlying (and perhaps truly quantum dynamical) meaning as well as its origin. Some of these issues can be analyzed with a general scheme of quantum…
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…
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.
Is the universe digital or analog? In this essay I argue that both classical and quantum physics include limits that prevent us from definitively answering that question. That quantum physics does so is no surprise. That classical physics…
I acknowledge a flaw in the paper "A quantum solution to the arrow of time dilemma": as pointed out by Jennings and Rudolph, (classical) mutual information is not an appropriate measure of information. This can be traced back to the quantum…
Quantum many-body dynamics generically results in increasing entanglement that eventually leads to thermalization of local observables. This makes the exact description of the dynamics complex despite the apparent simplicity of…
The statistical state of any (classical or quantum) system with non-trivial time evolution can be interpreted as the pointer of a clock. The quality of such a clock is given by the statistical distinguishability of its states at different…
The laws of Physics are time-reversible, making no qualitative distinction between the past and the future -- yet we can only go towards the future. This apparent contradiction is known as the "arrow of time problem". Its current resolution…
The conceptual definition and understanding of the nature of time, both qualitatively and quantitatively is of the utmost difficulty and importance, and plays a fundamental role in physics. Physical systems seem to evolve in paths of…
The nature of time in quantum mechanics is closely related to the use of a complex, rather than say real, Hilbert space. This becomes particularly clear when considering quantum field theory in time dependent backgrounds, such as in…
We introduce the notions of algorithmic mutual information and rarity of quantum states. These definitions enjoy conservation inequalities over unitary transformations and partial traces. We show that a large majority of pure states have…