Related papers: Nishimori's self-tuning as evidence for the existe…
The apparent fine-tuning of several fundamental parameters that determine the properties of our Universe and make it hospitable to life is sometimes used as an argument for God from design. I review the concept of cosmic fine-tuning and…
When a physicist says that a theory is fine-tuned, they mean that it must make a suspiciously precise assumption in order to explain a certain observation. This is evidence that the theory is deficient or incomplete. One particular case of…
Decompositions of the world into systems have typically been regarded as arbitrary extra-theoretical assumptions in discussions of quantum measurement. One can instead regard decompositions as part of the theory, and ask what conditions…
In his essay "Nature Conformable to Herself" the late Murray Gell-Mann expands on an observation of Newton that theories of seemingly disparate phenomena in the universe often make use of similar ideas and similar mathematical structure.…
One would not think that thought experiments could matter to nature, for they are a humble human device. Yet quantum mechanics very naturally frames thought experiments (as distinct from precisely defining what exists). They exemplify the…
It is argued that Feynman's rules for evaluating probabilities, combined with von Neumann's principle of psycho-physical parallelism, help avoid inconsistencies, often associated with quantum theory. The former allows one to assign…
We consider the logical assertions of a hypothetical observer who is inside a quantum computer and performs a reversible quantum measurement, obtaining a symmetric couple of new axioms, valid only inside the quantum computer. The result is…
A scenario is outlined for quantum measurement, assuming that self-sustaining classicality is the consequence of an attractive gravitational self-interaction acting on massive bodies, and randomness arises already in the classical domain. A…
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 measurement conundrum seems to have plagued quantum mechanics for so long that impressions of an inconsistency amongst its axioms have spawned. A demonstration that such purported inconsistency is fictitious may then be in order and is…
By imposing system-observer symmetry on the von Neumann description of measurement, it is shown that the quantum measurement problem is structurally equivalent to a familiar reverse-engineering problem: that of describing the behavior of an…
The conceptual relation between the measurability of quantum mechanical observables and the computability of numerical functions is re-examined. A new formulation is given for the notion of measurability with finite precision in order to…
This paper examines whether unitary evolution alone is sufficient to explain emergence of the classical world from the perspective of computability theory. Specifically, it looks at the problem of how the choice related to the measurement…
In this contribution I review rigorous formulations of a variety of limitations of measurability in quantum mechanics. To this end I begin with a brief presentation of the conceptual tools of modern measurement theory. I will make precise…
We critically analyze the rationale of arguments from finetuning and naturalness in particle physics and cosmology. Some other numerological coincidences are also discussed.
It is possible in principle to construct quantum mechanical observables and unitary operators which, if implemented in physical systems as measurements and dynamical evolution, would contradict the Church-Turing thesis, which lies at the…
I discuss some of the main interpretations given to explain the indeterministic nature of quantum measurements and show that all has some loopholes in one corner or another. I propose an alternative interpretation based on the notion of…
It is shown that the classical book by von Neumann proposing dynamics of measured systems with "reduction (or collapse) of system's wave packet" contains also hints how to avoid this discontinuity in time evolution of the measured system…
Inspired by the work of Feynman, Deutsch, We formally propose the theory of physical computability and accordingly, the physical complexity theory. To achieve this, a framework that can evaluate almost all forms of computation using various…
Recently, among experiments for realization of quantum computers, NMR quantum computers have achieved the most impressive succession. There is a model of the NMR quantum computation,namely Atsumi and Nishino's bulk quantum Turing Machine.…