Related papers: Quantum States as Ordinary Information
The only evidence we have for a discrete reality comes from quantum measurements; without invoking these measurements, quantum theory describes continuous entities. This seeming contradiction can be resolved via analysis that treats…
Quantum theory expresses the observable relations between physical properties in terms of probabilities that depend on the specific context described by the "state" of a system. However, the laws of physics that emerge at the macroscopic…
Although time is one of our most intuitive physical concepts, its understanding at the fundamental level is still an open question in physics. For instance, time in quantum mechanics and general relativity are two distinct and incompatible…
In usual quantum theory, the information available about a quantum system is defined in terms of the density matrix describing it on a spacelike surface. This definition must be generalized for extensions of quantum theory which do not have…
What kind of object is a quantum state? Is it an object that encodes an exponentially growing amount of information (in the size of the system) or more akin to a probability distribution? It turns out that these questions are sensitive to…
Quantum "states" are objective probability measures. Because their dependence on a time is not the time dependence of an evolving state, they are neither states of Nature nor "states of knowledge." There is no such thing as an evolving…
It is often stated that quantum mechanics only makes statistical predictions and that a quantum state is described by the various probability distributions associated with it. Can we describe a quantum state completely in terms of…
For many-particle systems, quantum information in base n can be defined by partitioning the set of states according to the outcomes of n-ary (joint) observables. Thereby, k particles can carry k nits. With regards to the randomness of…
According to quantum theory, pure physical states correspond to equivalence classes of state vectors, where any two members of one class differ by a complex factor. The point is that such a factor does not change the probability for the…
It is shown that quantum mechanics is a plausible statistical description of an ontology described by classical electrodynamics. The reason that no contradiction arises with various no-go theorems regarding the compatibility of QM with a…
Quantum mechanics is an outstandingly successful description of nature, underpinning fields from biology through chemistry to physics. At its heart is the quantum wavefunction, the central tool for describing quantum systems. Yet it is…
A quantum state can be understood in a loose sense as a map that assigns a value to every observable. Formalizing this characterization of states in terms of generalized probability distributions on the set of effects, we obtain a simple…
The question whether quantum measurements reflect some underlying objective reality has no generally accepted answer. We show that description of such reality is possible under natural conditions such as linearity and causality, although in…
In this sequence of papers, noncommutative analysis is used to give a consistent axiomatic approach to a unified conceptual foundation of classical and quantum physics. The present Part I defines the concepts of observables, states and…
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…
Is quantum mechanics about 'states'? Or is it basically another kind of probability theory? It is argued that the elementary formalism of quantum mechanics operates as a well-justified alternative to 'classical' instantiations of a…
We give a review of concepts related to connection of classical and quantum theories, from the phase space perspective. Quantum theory is described by non-commutative operators of coordinates and momenta, results in values having a certain…
It has been suggested, on the one hand, that quantum states are just states of knowledge; and, on the other, that quantum theory is merely a theory of correlations. These suggestions are confronted with problems about the nature of…
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…
Entanglement is one of the pillars of quantum mechanics and quantum information processing, and as a result the quantumness of nonentangled states has typically been overlooked and unrecognized. We give a robust definition for the…