Determinism Beyond Time Evolution

Physicists are increasingly beginning to take seriously the possibility of laws outside the traditional time-evolution paradigm; yet many popular definitions of determinism are still predicated on a time-evolution picture, making them manifestly unsuited to the diverse range of research programmes in modern physics. In this article, we use a constraint-based framework to set out a generalization of determinism which does not presuppose temporal evolution, distinguishing between strong, weak and delocalised holistic determinism. We discuss some interesting consequences of these generalized notions of determinism, and we show that this approach sheds new light on the long-standing debate surrounding the nature of objective chance

Notes on Ernest Nagel’s Philosophy of History: Historical Determinism Revisited

In this article, I analyse common arguments raised against historical determinism. I refer to the treatment given to the topic by Ernest Nagel in “Determinism in History” (1959). Nagel identifies five different arguments which allegedly show that history is not deterministic and argues that they fall short. I revisit, re-evaluate, and make amendments to these arguments. Special attention is given to one of them: The argument that the emergence of novelties in human affairs would be incompatible with the standard view of determinism. I use the theory of convergent evolution to clarify why novelties cannot be used against the deterministic assumption, especially if by determinism we mean only the ontological sense of the doctrine – which I call uniqueness of evolution – and not predictive determinism. I conclude that common attacks on the possibility of historical determinism are grounded on incomplete human knowledge of the historical world. 

Semiclassical analysis and sensitivity to initial conditions

We present several recent results concerning the transition between quantum and classical mechanics, in the situation where the underlying dynamical system has an hyperbolic behaviour. The special role of invariant manifolds will be emphasized, and the long time evolution will show how the quantum non-determinism and the classical chaotic sensitivity to initial conditions can be compared, and in a certain sense overlap

Reversibility in the Extended Measurement-based Quantum Computation

When applied on some particular quantum entangled states, measurements are universal for quantum computing. In particular, despite the fondamental probabilistic evolution of quantum measurements, any unitary evolution can be simulated by a measurement-based quantum computer (MBQC). We consider the extended version of the MBQC where each measurement can occur not only in the (X,Y)-plane of the Bloch sphere but also in the (X,Z)- and (Y,Z)-planes. The existence of a gflow in the underlying graph of the computation is a necessary and sufficient condition for a certain kind of determinism. We extend the focused gflow (a gflow in a particular normal form) defined for the (X,Y)-plane to the extended case, and we provide necessary and sufficient conditions for the existence of such normal forms

Some Notes on Theories of Technology, Society and Innovation Systems for S&T Policy Studies

This paper is an examination of technological determinism – the shaping of society by technology – and the influence of society on the evolution of technology

Anvil or Onion? Determinism as a Layered Concept

Stephen Kellert (1993) has argued that Laplacean determinism in classical physics is actually a layered concept, where various properties or layers composing this form of determinism can be peeled away. Here, I argue that a layered conception of determinism is inappropriate and that we should think in terms of different deterministic models applicable to different kinds of systems. The upshot of this analysis is that the notion of state is more closely tied to the kind of system being investigated than is usually considered in discussions of determinism. So when investigating determinism corresponding changes to the appropriate notion of state–and, perhaps, the state space itself–also need to be considered

Finding Optimal Flows Efficiently

Among the models of quantum computation, the One-way Quantum Computer is one of the most promising proposals of physical realization, and opens new perspectives for parallelization by taking advantage of quantum entanglement. Since a one-way quantum computation is based on quantum measurement, which is a fundamentally nondeterministic evolution, a sufficient condition of global determinism has been introduced as the existence of a causal flow in a graph that underlies the computation. A O(n^3)-algorithm has been introduced for finding such a causal flow when the numbers of output and input vertices in the graph are equal, otherwise no polynomial time algorithm was known for deciding whether a graph has a causal flow or not. Our main contribution is to introduce a O(n^2)-algorithm for finding a causal flow, if any, whatever the numbers of input and output vertices are. This answers the open question stated by Danos and Kashefi and by de Beaudrap. Moreover, we prove that our algorithm produces an optimal flow (flow of minimal depth.) Whereas the existence of a causal flow is a sufficient condition for determinism, it is not a necessary condition. A weaker version of the causal flow, called gflow (generalized flow) has been introduced and has been proved to be a necessary and sufficient condition for a family of deterministic computations. Moreover the depth of the quantum computation is upper bounded by the depth of the gflow. However, the existence of a polynomial time algorithm that finds a gflow has been stated as an open question. In this paper we answer this positively with a polynomial time algorithm that outputs an optimal gflow of a given graph and thus finds an optimal correction strategy to the nondeterministic evolution due to measurements.Comment: 10 pages, 3 figure