Related papers: Probability and Entropy in Quantum Theory
Quantum theory's irreducible empirical core is a probability calculus. While it presupposes the events to which (and on the basis of which) it serves to assign probabilities, and therefore cannot account for their occurrence, it has to be…
Entropic uncertainty relations play an important role in both fundamentals and applications of quantum theory. Although they have been well-investigated in quantum theory, little is known about entropic uncertainty in generalized…
Quantum experiments yield random data. We show that the most efficient way to store this empirical information by a finite number of bits is by means of the vector of square roots of observed relative frequencies. This vector has the unique…
Quantum theory is a probabilistic theory with fixed causal structure. General relativity is a deterministic theory but where the causal structure is dynamic. It is reasonable to expect that quantum gravity will be a probabilistic theory…
Discussions of quantum mechanics often loosely claim that time evolution logically must be unitary, in order for the probabilistic interpretation of the amplitudes of the state vector to make sense at all times. We discuss from first…
I show that probabilities in quantum mechanics are a measure of belief in the presence of human ignorance, just like all other probabilities. The Born interpretation of the square of modulus of the wave function arises from the interaction…
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…
The properties of an alternative definition of quantum entropy, based on Wigner functions, are discussed. Such definition emerges naturally from the Wigner representation of quantum mechanics, and can easily quantify the amount of…
A version of quantum theory is derived from a set of plausible assumptions related to the following general setting: For a given system there is a set of experiments that can be performed, and for each such experiment an ordinary…
The basic requirement that, in quantum theory, the time-evolution of any state is determined by the action of a unitary operator, is shown to be the underlying cause for certain ``exact'' results which have recently been reported about the…
Both statistics and quantum theory deal with prediction using probability. We will show that there can be established a connection between these two areas. This will at the same time suggest a new, less formalistic way of looking upon basic…
The familiar "modulus squared" form of all quantum mechanical probabilities is derived from an assumption of equal a priori probabilities concerning the final states available.
Spacetime manifolds that are not time orientable play a key role in a gravitational explanation of quantum theory. Such manifolds allow topology change, but also have fascinating additional properties such as net charge from source-free…
Quantum theory predicts probabilities as well as relative phases between different alternatives of the system. A unified description of both probabilities and phases comes through a generalisation of the notion of a density matrix for…
Using the known possibility to associate the completely positive maps with density matrices and recent results on expressing the density matrices with sets of classical probability distributions of dichotomic random variables we construct…
Most attempts to argue for the second law of thermodynamics fail because (1) they use the unviable frequency theory of probability and (2) they do not explain why the arrow of time seen in experiments is aligned with the thermodynamic arrow…
We develop a new formalism for constructing probabilities associated to the causal ordering of events in quantum theory, where by an event we mean the emergence of a measurement record on a detector. We start with constructing probabilities…
The Born probability measure describes the statistics of measurements in which observers self-locate themselves in some region of reality. In $\psi$-ontic quantum theories, reality is directly represented by the wavefunction. We show that…
Logical entropy gives a measure, in the sense of measure theory, of the distinctions of a given partition of a set, an idea that can be naturally generalized to classical probability distributions. Here, we analyze how fundamental concepts…
The framework of generalized probabilistic theories is a powerful tool for studying the foundations of quantum physics. It provides the basis for a variety of recent findings that significantly improve our understanding of the rich physical…