Related papers: John von Neumann's 1950s Change to Philosopher of …
Orthodox Copenhagen quantum theory renounces the quest to understand the reality in which we are imbedded, and settles for practical rules that describe connections between our observations. Many physicist have believed that this…
The von Neumann attitude on such a deep interpretational question as the role of a human observer in order for the quantum description of measurement to be consistent has been long misrepresented. The large majority of the subsequent…
The name of John von Neumann is common both in quantum mechanics and computer science. Are they really two absolutely unconnected areas? Many works devoted to quantum computations and communications are serious argument to suggest about…
This essay gives a short, informal account of the development of digital logic from the Pleistocene to the Manhattan Project, the introduction of reversible circuits, and Richard Feynman's allied proposal for quantum computing. We argue…
In two papers entitled "On a new foundation [Neue Begr\"undung] of quantum mechanics," Pascual Jordan (1927b,g) presented his version of what came to be known as the Dirac-Jordan statistical transformation theory. As an alternative that…
The (meta)logic underlying classical theory of computation is Boolean (two-valued) logic. Quantum logic was proposed by Birkhoff and von Neumann as a logic of quantum mechanics more than sixty years ago. The major difference between Boolean…
Since its inception, many physicists have seen in quantum mechanics the possibility, if not the necessity, of bringing cognitive aspects into the play, which were instead absent, or unnoticed, in the previous classical theories. In this…
In this paper we discuss the relevance of the algebraic approach to quantum phenomena first introduced by von Neumann before he confessed to Birkoff that he no longer believed in Hilbert space. This approach is more general and allows us to…
Fifty years ago, John von Neumann compared the architecture of the brain with that of computers that he invented and which is still in use today. In those days, the organisation of computers was based on concepts of brain organisation.…
Alan Turing's pioneering work on computability, and his ideas on morphological computing support Andrew Hodges' view of Turing as a natural philosopher. Turing's natural philosophy differs importantly from Galileo's view that the book of…
Today's computing is told to be based on the classic paradigm, proposed by von Neumann, a three-quarter century ago. However, that paradigm was justified (for the timing relations of) vacuum tubes only. The technological development…
Self-replication is central to all life, and yet how it dynamically emerges in physical, non-equilibrium systems remains poorly understood. Von Neumann's pioneering work in the 1940s and subsequent developments suggest a natural hypothesis:…
This paper examines the philosophical relationship between Thomas Kuhn's concept of scientific paradigms and the programming paradigm concept in computing that was introduced by Floyd in his 1978 Turing Award lecture. Through critical…
In a previous article [H. Bergeron, J. Math. Phys. 42, 3983 (2001)], we presented a method to obtain a continuous transition from classical to quantum mechanics starting from the usual phase space formulation of classical mechanics. This…
The abstraction introduced by von Neumann correctly reflected the state of the art 70 years ago. Although it omitted data transmission time between components of the computer, it served as an excellent base for classic computing for…
From the philosopher's perspective, the interest in quantum computation stems primarily from the way that it combines fundamental concepts from two distinct sciences: physics (especially quantum mechanics) and computer science, each long a…
The history of computer science and brain sciences are intertwined. In his unfinished manuscript "The Computer and the Brain," von Neumann debates whether or not the brain can be thought of as a computing machine and identifies some of the…
Manin, Feynman, and Deutsch have viewed quantum computing as a kind of universal physical simulation procedure. Much of the writing about quantum logic circuits and quantum Turing machines has shown how these machines can simulate an…
Incomputability as a mathematical notion arose from work of Alan Turing and Alonzo Church in the 1930s. Like Turing himself, it attracted less attention than it deserved beyond the confines of mathematics. Today our experiences in computer…
In the half century since the 1950s computer simulation has transformed our understanding of physics. The rare, expensive, slow, and bulky mainframes of World War II have given way to today's millions of cheap, fast, desksized workstations…