Related papers: Reality, No Matter How You Slice It
Despite various parallels between quantum states and ordinary information, quantum no-go-theorems have convinced many that there is no realistic framework that might underly quantum theory, no reality that quantum states can represent…
In his famous 1989 It from Bit essay, John Wheeler contends that the stuff of the physical universe, or it, arises from information or bits, encoded in yes or no answers. Wheeler's question and assumptions are reexamined from a post Aspect…
We argue, through some philosophical considerations, on (i)dependent or (ii) an independent existence of physical reality underlying quantum states. According these simple considerations, we conclude that is impossible to have a clear…
We believe that the hypothesis `it from bit' originates from the assumption that probabilities have a fundamental, irremovable status in quantum theory. We argue against this assumption and highlight four well-known reformulations /…
Is our world just information? We argue that our current notion of information has one serious shortcoming: It is quite literally meaningless. We suggest a meaningful extension of the notion of information that is dynamic, internal,…
I argue that, on the subjective Bayesian interpretation of probability, "it from bit" requires a generalization of probability theory. This does not get us all the way to the quantum probability rule because an extra constraint, known as…
The main mystery of quantum mechanics is contained in Wheeler's delayed choice experiment, which shows that the past is determined by our choice of what quantum property to observe. This gives the observer a participatory role in deciding…
Despite the obvious utility of the concept, it has often been argued that time does not exist. I take the opposite perspective: let's imagine that time does exist, and the universe is described by a quantum state obeying ordinary…
Based on a synthesis of three main ingredients: (i) the Shannon information in nonequilibrium systems, (ii) the semiclassical energy-time quantization rule, and (iii) the quasistatic information-energy correspondence, a new general rule for…
I will propose that the reality to which the quantum formalism implicitly refers is a kind of generalized history, the word history having here the same meaning as in the phrase sum-over-histories. This proposal confers a certain…
In this short essay it is argued that the "It from Bit" idea is plausible when assuming "generalized bits", resulting from the Kolmogorov superposition theorem, as universal building blocks.
It is argued that quantum mechanics follows naturally from the assumptions that there are no fundamental causal laws but only probabilities for physical processes that are constrained by symmetries, and reality is relational in the sense…
This paper is based on four assumptions: 1. Physical reality is made of linearly behaving components combined in non-linear ways. 2. Higher level behaviour emerges from this lower level structure. 3. The way the lower level elements behaves…
The implications of the physical theory of quantum mechanics on the question of realism is much a subject of sustaining interest, while the background questions among physicists on how to think about all the theoretical notion and…
This paper explores the idea that the universe is a virtual reality created by information processing, and relates this strange idea to the findings of modern physics about the physical world. The virtual reality concept is familiar to us…
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…
In his 1989 essay, John Archibald Wheeler has tried to answer the eternal question of existence. He did it by searching for links between information, physics, and quanta. The main concept emerging from his essay is that "every physical…
Using information technology, humans have brought about the Information Revolution, which is changing the world faster and more profoundly than ever before. How is this possible? An answer is suggested by comments of James Moor, regarding…
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…
By means of a thought-experiment, consisting of an interference experiment with two interfering beams, it is shown that it can be demonstrated experimentally that with one single particle a wave can be associated which propagates in space…