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Related papers: Contextuality: It's a Feature, not a Bug

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Our everyday experiences support the hypothesis that physical systems exist independently of the act of observation. Concordant theories are characterized by the objective realism assumption whereby the act of measurement simply reveals…

Quantum Physics · Physics 2013-04-05 Jayne Thompson , Pawel Kurzynski , Su-Yong Lee , Akihito Soeda , Dagomir Kaszlikowski

Can quantum theory be applied on all scales? While there are many arguments for the universality of quantum theory, this question remains a subject of debate. It is unknown how far the existence of macroscopic irreversibility can be derived…

Quantum Physics · Physics 2025-05-30 Maria Violaris

Uncertainty relations express limits on the extent to which the outcomes of distinct measurements on a single state can be made jointly predictable. The existence of nontrivial uncertainty relations in quantum theory is generally considered…

Quantum Physics · Physics 2022-12-14 Lorenzo Catani , Matthew Leifer , Giovanni Scala , David Schmid , Robert W. Spekkens

Contextuality, a key resource for quantum advantage, describes systems in which the outcome of a measurement is not independent of other compatible measurements, in contrast to classical hidden-variable descriptions. We investigate the…

Quantum Physics · Physics 2025-12-08 Caroline Lima , María Rosa Preciado-Rivas , Sanchit Srivastava

Identifying when observed statistics cannot be explained by any reasonable classical model is a central problem in quantum foundations. A principled and universally applicable approach to defining and identifying nonclassicality is given by…

The paper reviews and discusses four ideas scattered in previous papers of the author. First, objective properties of quantum systems are not associated with observables but are defined by preparations. Second, measurable results of…

Quantum Physics · Physics 2016-07-29 Petr Hajicek

We argue that Anton Zeilinger's "foundational conceptual principle" for quantum mechanics according to which an elementary system carries one bit of information is an idealistic principle, which should be replaced by a realistic principle…

Quantum Physics · Physics 2022-03-29 Frederique Laurent , Francois-Igor Pris

Recently a study of the first superposed mechanical quantum object ("machine") visible to the naked eye was published. However, as we show, it turns out that if the object would actually be observed, i.e. would interact with an optical…

General Physics · Physics 2015-04-01 Johan Hansson

I suggest that measurement in quantum theory should be regarded as a sense of time (of things happening), which is as important as the conventional relativistic notion of time. A key question -- of basic physical interest whether one…

General Relativity and Quantum Cosmology · Physics 2008-12-15 Adam Helfer

The presence of contextuality in quantum theory was first highlighted by Bell, Kochen and Specker, who discovered that for quantum systems of three or more dimensions, measurements cannot be viewed as revealing pre-existing properties of…

Quantum Physics · Physics 2017-04-07 Andrew W. Simmons , Joel J. Wallman , Hakop Pashayan , Stephen D. Bartlett , Terry Rudolph

This paper is a brief overview of the concepts involved in measuring the degree of contextuality and detecting contextuality in systems of binary measurements of a finite number of objects. We discuss and clarify the main concepts and…

Quantum Physics · Physics 2016-01-21 Ehtibar N. Dzhafarov , Janne V. Kujala , Victor H. Cervantes

A new quantum ontology of quantum mechanics has been proposed recently. This ontology is based on impossible to realize measurements which need to be performed repeatedly on the same single physical system or on the same pair of physical…

Quantum Physics · Physics 2016-02-11 Marian Kupczynski

In order to claim that one has experimentally tested whether a noncontextual ontological model could underlie certain measurement statistics in quantum theory, it is necessary to have a notion of noncontextuality that applies to unsharp…

Quantum Physics · Physics 2015-01-07 Robert W. Spekkens

An operational definition of contextuality is introduced which generalizes the standard notion in three ways: (1) it applies to arbitrary operational theories rather than just quantum theory, (2) it applies to arbitrary experimental…

Quantum Physics · Physics 2016-09-08 R. W. Spekkens

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 Physics · Physics 2011-06-08 Ken Wharton

Contextuality is a central feature of quantum theory, traditionally understood as the impossibility of reproducing quantum measurement statistics using noncontextual ontological models. We study classical ontological descriptions in which a…

Artificial Intelligence · Computer Science 2026-04-16 Song-Ju Kim

This paper develops an agent-centric account of measurement that treats the preferred-basis problem is fundamentally perspectival. On this view, the system--apparatus--environment decomposition and the observables that are apt to become…

Quantum Physics · Physics 2025-10-21 Peter W. Evans

It is widely believed that theory is useful in physics because it describes simple systems and that strictly empirical phenomenological approaches are necessary for complex biological and social systems. Here we prove based upon an analysis…

Physics and Society · Physics 2013-08-15 Yaneer Bar-Yam

Quantum nonlocality and contextuality are two phenomena stemming from nonclassical correlations. Whereas the former requires entanglement that is consumed in the measurement process the latter can occur for any state if one chooses a proper…

Quantum Physics · Physics 2016-05-11 Marek Wajs , Su-Yong Lee , Pawel Kurzynski , Dagomir Kaszlikowski

Recent years have seen new general notions of contextuality emerge. Most of these employ context-independent symbols to represent random variables in different contexts. As an example, the operational theory of Spekkens [1] treats an…

Quantum Physics · Physics 2020-11-16 Mojtaba Aliakbarzadeh , Kirsty Kitto