191,764 research outputs found
Information and The Brukner-Zeilinger Interpretation of Quantum Mechanics: A Critical Investigation
In Brukner and Zeilinger's interpretation of quantum mechanics, information
is introduced as the most fundamental notion and the finiteness of information
is considered as an essential feature of quantum systems. They also define a
new measure of information which is inherently different from the Shannon
information and try to show that the latter is not useful in defining the
information content in a quantum object.
Here, we show that there are serious problems in their approach which make
their efforts unsatisfactory. The finiteness of information does not explain
how objective results appear in experiments and what an instantaneous change in
the so-called information vector (or catalog of knowledge) really means during
the measurement. On the other hand, Brukner and Zeilinger's definition of a new
measure of information may lose its significance, when the spin measurement of
an elementary system is treated realistically. Hence, the sum of the individual
measures of information may not be a conserved value in real experiments.Comment: 20 pages, two figures, last version. Section 4 is replaced by a new
argument. Other sections are improved. An appendix and new references are
adde
Information Invariance and Quantum Probabilities
We consider probabilistic theories in which the most elementary system, a
two-dimensional system, contains one bit of information. The bit is assumed to
be contained in any complete set of mutually complementary measurements. The
requirement of invariance of the information under a continuous change of the
set of mutually complementary measurements uniquely singles out a measure of
information, which is quadratic in probabilities. The assumption which gives
the same scaling of the number of degrees of freedom with the dimension as in
quantum theory follows essentially from the assumption that all physical states
of a higher dimensional system are those and only those from which one can
post-select physical states of two-dimensional systems. The requirement that no
more than one bit of information (as quantified by the quadratic measure) is
contained in all possible post-selected two-dimensional systems is equivalent
to the positivity of density operator in quantum theory.Comment: 8 pages, 1 figure. This article is dedicated to Pekka Lahti on the
occasion of his 60th birthday. Found. Phys. (2009
A Computational Model for Quantum Measurement
Is the dynamical evolution of physical systems objectively a manifestation of
information processing by the universe? We find that an affirmative answer has
important consequences for the measurement problem. In particular, we calculate
the amount of quantum information processing involved in the evolution of
physical systems, assuming a finite degree of fine-graining of Hilbert space.
This assumption is shown to imply that there is a finite capacity to sustain
the immense entanglement that measurement entails. When this capacity is
overwhelmed, the system's unitary evolution becomes computationally unstable
and the system suffers an information transition (`collapse'). Classical
behaviour arises from the rapid cycles of unitary evolution and information
transitions.
Thus, the fine-graining of Hilbert space determines the location of the
`Heisenberg cut', the mesoscopic threshold separating the microscopic, quantum
system from the macroscopic, classical environment. The model can be viewed as
a probablistic complement to decoherence, that completes the measurement
process by turning decohered improper mixtures of states into proper mixtures.
It is shown to provide a natural resolution to the measurement problem and the
basis problem.Comment: 24 pages; REVTeX4; published versio
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