Unscrambling the Quantum Omelette

Svozil, Karl

doi:10.1007/s10773-013-1995-3

Cited by 11 publications

(14 citation statements)

References 44 publications

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“…I personally have a rather simple stance towards these issues, which comes out of my inclinations [45] towards "The Church of the larger Hilbert space." I believe that Dirac [46] and von Neumann [3] had it all right -alas in a surprising, literal way.…”

Section: Discussionmentioning

confidence: 99%

Generalized Event Structures and Probabilities

Svozil

2016

Information and Complexity

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For the classical mind, quantum mechanics is boggling enough; nevertheless more bizarre behavior could be imagined, thereby concentrating on propositional structures (empirical logics) that transcend the quantum domain. One can also consistently suppose predictions and probabilities which are neither classical nor quantum, but which are subject to subclassicality; that is, the additivity of probabilities for mutually exclusive, co-measurable observables, as formalized by admissibility rules and frame functions.

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Section: Discussionmentioning

confidence: 99%

Generalized Event Structures and Probabilities

Svozil

2016

Information and Complexity

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“…They are delusive because they confuse ontology with epistemology [15,16] by suggesting the physical co-existence of counterfactuals; in particular, classically inconsistent cases, in an exploitable classical manner. However, upon closer inspection, this alleged capacity might just be a consequence of a misconception yielding an operational ill-representation of the quantum state [17].…”

Section: Parallel Processing By Superpositionsmentioning

confidence: 99%

Quantum hocus-pocus

Svozil¹

2016

Ethics. Sci. Environ. Polit.

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The claims made in a manifesto resulting in the European quantum technologies flagship initiative in quantum technology and similar enterprises are taken as starting point to critically review some potential quantum resources, such as coherent superposition and entanglement, and their potential usefulness for parallelism and communication. Claims of absolute, irreducible (non-epistemic) randomness are argued to be metaphysical. Cryptanalytic man-in-the-middle attacks on quantum cryptography are well known to be feasible, but hardly mentioned. If all of this is taken into account, a more sober perspective on quantum capacities emerges, but one that may be ethically more justified than the "hype and magic" that drives many current initiatives.

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“…[2] presents such a qutrit configuration. One may object to this scenario of quantum indeterminism by pointing out that it is merely based on a believe -actually, Born's inclinations "to give up determinism in the world of atoms" [9, p. 866] (English translation in [58, p. 54]) -with provable formal improvability [53]. We shall come back to related issues later.…”

Section: Quantum Beam Splittermentioning

confidence: 99%

“…Alas, this is true only for all practical purposes [38,45,27,7,44,60,35,39,15,30], that is, relative to the physical means [37] available to resolve the huge number of degrees of freedom involving a "macroscopic" measurement apparatus. And yet, at least in principle, if the unitary quantum evolution is taken to be universally valid, then any distinction or cut between the observer and the measurement apparatus on the one side, and the quantized object on the other side, is not absolute or ontic, but epistemic, means-relative, subjective and conventional [53].…”

Section: Wigner's and Everett's Arguments Against Quantum Measurementmentioning

confidence: 99%

Physical Aspects of Oracles for Randomness and Hadamard’s Conjecture

Svozil

2014

Computing With New Resources

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Abstract. We analyze the physical aspects and origins of currently proposed oracles for (absolute) randomness.Keywords: stochastic processes, oracle computation, indeterminism, random number generator, quantum measurement 1 Metamathematical and metaphysical origin of oracles for randomness Jozef Gruska's extensive reviews of the foundations of computing [28], and quantum computing [29] documents his continued interest in the foundations of, and the connections between, computation and physics. This encouraged me to contribute to the physics of computation, in particular, by discussing nonalgorithmic oracles for randomness certified by physical principles. The very existence of physical unknowables [51] and indeterminism is subject to an ongoing debate that can be expected not to terminate at any time soon. Thereby, like Odysseus trapped between Scylla and Charybdis, our perception of how the universe is organized has been vacuously oscillating between, and irritated by, claims of physical determinism on the one hand, as well as complete indeterminism on the other hand.Rather than arguing for one side or another, I would like to state upfront that both positions are metaphysical; more precisely: from a physical perspective, these claims are non-operational. And, formally, by reduction to the halting problem [28, Sec. 642], both of them are provable unprovable. Because, form a purely phenomenological point of view, that is, in terms of the symbolic behaviour of physical systems, any proof of determinism would imply solvability of the rule inference problem [5], as well as total predictability even beyond the Busy Beaver bound [14]. Likewise, any claim of total indeterminism encounters the problem of enumerating an infinity of "candidate theories of everything" [6], let alone their future behaviour, as mentioned earlier.Nevertheless, one way of corroborating physical indeterminism, which could then be used for the construction of evidence-based oracles for randomness, would be to "screw open" physical boxes which allegedly produce random bits.

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Unscrambling the Quantum Omelette

Cited by 11 publications

References 44 publications

Generalized Event Structures and Probabilities

Generalized Event Structures and Probabilities

Quantum hocus-pocus

Physical Aspects of Oracles for Randomness and Hadamard’s Conjecture

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