Related papers: Whose Knowledge?
Ninety years ago in 1927, at an international congress in Como, Italy, Niels Bohr gave an address which is recognized as the first instance in which the term "complementarity", as a physical concept, was spoken publicly [1], revealing…
We investigate the structure common to causal theories that attempt to explain a (part of) the world. Causality implies conservation of identity, itself a far from simple notion. It imposes strong demands on the universalizing power of the…
The Pusey-Barrett-Rudolph theorem has recently provoked a lot of discussion regarding the reality of the quantum state. In this article we focus on a property called antidistinguishability, which is a main component in constructing the…
A mixed quantum state can be taken as capturing an unspecified form of ignorance; or as describing the lack of knowledge about the true pure state of the system ("proper mixture"); or as arising from entanglement with another system that…
If the block universe view is correct, the future and the past have similar status and one would expect physical theories to involve final as well as initial boundary conditions. A plausible consistency condition between the initial and…
Since its emergence, quantum mechanics has been a challenge for an understanding of reality which is based on our intuition in a classical world. Nevertheless, it has often been tried to impose this understanding of reality on quantum…
A suitable unified statistical formulation of quantum and classical mechanics in a *-algebraic setting leads us to conclude that information itself is noncommutative in quantum mechanics. Specifically we refer here to an observer's…
It is possible to completely explain all aspects of quantum mechanics by expressing the relations between physical properties in terms of complex conditional probabilities (Phys. Rev. A 89, 042115(2014)). These fully deterministic…
Quantum coherence constitutes a foundational characteristic of quantum mechanics and is integral to emerging quantum resource theories. However, quantum coherence is severely restricted by environmental noise in general quantum processing,…
The interpretation of quantum mechanics has been discussed since this theme first was brought up by Einstein and Bohr. This article describes a proposal for a new foundation of quantum theory, partly drawing upon ideas from statistical…
We consider the relation between knowledge and certainty, where a fact is known if it is true at all worlds an agent considers possible and is certain if it holds with probability 1. We identify certainty with probabilistic belief. We show…
The concept of coherence is one of cornerstones in physics. The development of quantum information science has lead to renewed interest in properly approaching the coherence at the quantum level. Various measures could be proposed to…
Physical systems contain information which can be divided between classical and quantum information. Classical information is locally accessible and allows one to perform tasks such as physical work, while quantum information allows one to…
Scholars of the history and philosophy of science have asked what would decolonized science would look like. This paper develops an answer by interrogating the assumption that observations need to be recorded and communicated using the…
From its earliest days nearly a century ago, quantum mechanics has proven itself to be a tremendously accurate yet intellectually unsatisfying theory to many. Not the least of its problems is that it is a theory about the results of…
Does the quantum state represent reality or our knowledge of reality? In making this distinction precise, we are led to a novel classification of hidden variable models of quantum theory. Indeed, representatives of each class can be found…
The properties of coherence and polarization of light has been the subject of intense investigations and form the basis of many technological applications. These concepts which historically have been treated independently can now be…
Quantum theory is formulated as the only consistent way to manipulate probability amplitudes. The crucial ingredient is a consistency constraint: if there are two different ways to compute an amplitude the two answers must agree. This…
Complexity is an interdisciplinary concept which, first of all, addresses the question of how order emerges out of randomness. For many reasons matrices provide a very practical and powerful tool in approaching and quantifying the related…
From the ancient Einstein-Podolsky-Rosen paradox to the recent Sorkin-type impossible measurements problem, the contradictions between relativistic causality, quantum non-locality, and quantum measurement have persisted. Based on quantum…