Related papers: Whose Knowledge?
The Wigner's friend paradox concerns one of the most puzzling problems of quantum mechanics: the consistent description of multiple nested observers. Recently, a variation of Wigner's gedankenexperiment, introduced by Frauchiger and Renner,…
Bell's theorem has fascinated physicists and philosophers since his 1964 paper, which was written in response to the 1935 paper of Einstein, Podolsky, and Rosen. Bell's theorem and its many extensions have led to the claim that quantum…
We present a toy theory that is based on a simple principle: the number of questions about the physical state of a system that are answered must always be equal to the number that are unanswered in a state of maximal knowledge. A wide…
"All men by nature desire to know," states Aristotle in the famous first sentence of his Metaphysics. Knowledge about fundamental particles and interactions, that is, knowledge about the deepest aspects of matter, is certainly high if not…
The basic premise of Quantum Mechanics, embodied in the doctrine of wave-particle duality, assigns both, a particle and a wave structure to the physical entities. The classical laws describing the motion of a particle and the evolution of a…
According to a recent no-go theorem (M. Pusey, J. Barrett and T. Rudolph, Nature Physics 8, 475 (2012)), models in which quantum states correspond to probability distributions over the values of some underlying physical variables must have…
The constancy of the speed of light (the maximum velocity of interaction) is the second postulate of Albert Einstein's special theory of relativity. Currently, there is no correct theoretical proof of this constancy in all inertial frames…
In this paper, without any priori assumption about the post-measurement state of system, we will examine how this state is restricted by assuming each of these following assumptions. First, by using this reasonable assumption that two…
The properties which give quantum mechanics its unique character - unitarity, complementarity, non-commutativity, uncertainty, nonlocality - derive from the algebraic structure of Hermitian operators acting on the wavefunction in complex…
The dynamics of physical theories is usually described by differential equations. Difference equations then appear mainly as an approximation which can be used for a numerical analysis. As such, they have to fulfill certain conditions to…
Entropy is the distinguishing and most important concept of our efforts to understand and regularize our observations of a very large class of natural phenomena, and yet, it is one of the most contentious concepts of physics. In this…
According to quantum mechanics, the informational content of isolated systems does not change in time. However, subadditivity of entropy seems to describe an excess of information when we look at single parts of a composite systems and…
Everett's Relative State Interpretation (aka Many Worlds Interpretation) has gained increasing interest due to the progress understanding the role of decoherence. In order to fulfill its promise as an intellectually economic realistic…
Coherence is a familiar concept in physics: It is the driving force behind wavelike phenomena such as the diffraction of light. Moreover, wave-particle duality implies that all quantum objects can exhibit coherence, and this quantum…
In light of G\"{o}del's undecidability results (incomplete theorems) for math, quantum indeterminism indicates that physics and the Universe may be indeterministic, incomplete, and open in nature, and therefore demand no single unification…
We present a necessary and sufficient condition for three qutrit density matrices to be the one-particle reduced density matrices of a pure three-qutrit quantum state. The condition consists of seven classes of inequalities satisfied by the…
The possibility of a quantum system to exhibit properties that are akin to both the classically held notions of being a particle and a wave, is one of the most intriguing aspects of the quantum description of nature. These aspects have been…
Quantum mechanics is derived from the principle that the universe contain as much variety as possible, in the sense of maximizing the distinctiveness of each subsystem. The quantum state of a microscopic system is defined to correspond to…
In this paper we identify a hidden premise in Bell's theorem: measurability of the underlying space. But our system (the space of all paths, SP) is not measurable, although it replicates the predictions of standard quantum mechanics. Using…
Contextuality, the impossibility of assigning a single random variable to represent the outcomes of the same measurement procedure under different experimental conditions, is a central aspect of quantum mechanics. Thus defined, it appears…