Lorenz, G\"{o}del and Penrose: New perspectives on determinism and causality in fundamental physics

Despite being known for his pioneering work on chaotic unpredictability, the key discovery at the core of meteorologist Ed Lorenz's work is the link between space-time calculus and state-space fractal geometry. Indeed, properties of Lorenz's fractal invariant set relate space-time calculus to deep areas of mathematics such as G\"{o}del's Incompleteness Theorem. These properties, combined with some recent developments in theoretical and observational cosmology, motivate what is referred to as the `cosmological invariant set postulate': that the universe $U$ can be considered a deterministic dynamical system evolving on a causal measure-zero fractal invariant set $I_U$ in its state space. Symbolic representations of $I_U$ are constructed explicitly based on permutation representations of quaternions. The resulting `invariant set theory' provides some new perspectives on determinism and causality in fundamental physics. For example, whilst the cosmological invariant set appears to have a rich enough structure to allow a description of quantum probability, its measure-zero character ensures it is sparse enough to prevent invariant set theory being constrained by the Bell inequality (consistent with a partial violation of the so-called measurement independence postulate). The primacy of geometry as embodied in the proposed theory extends the principles underpinning general relativity. As a result, the physical basis for contemporary programmes which apply standard field quantisation to some putative gravitational lagrangian is questioned. Consistent with Penrose's suggestion of a deterministic but non-computable theory of fundamental physics, a `gravitational theory of the quantum' is proposed based on the geometry of $I_U$, with potential observational consequences for the dark universe.Comment: This manuscript has been accepted for publication in Contemporary Physics and is based on the author's 9th Dennis Sciama Lecture, given in Oxford and Triest

Formal Analysis of CRT-RSA Vigilant's Countermeasure Against the BellCoRe Attack: A Pledge for Formal Methods in the Field of Implementation Security

In our paper at PROOFS 2013, we formally studied a few known countermeasures to protect CRT-RSA against the BellCoRe fault injection attack. However, we left Vigilant's countermeasure and its alleged repaired version by Coron et al. as future work, because the arithmetical framework of our tool was not sufficiently powerful. In this paper we bridge this gap and then use the same methodology to formally study both versions of the countermeasure. We obtain surprising results, which we believe demonstrate the importance of formal analysis in the field of implementation security. Indeed, the original version of Vigilant's countermeasure is actually broken, but not as much as Coron et al. thought it was. As a consequence, the repaired version they proposed can be simplified. It can actually be simplified even further as two of the nine modular verifications happen to be unnecessary. Fortunately, we could formally prove the simplified repaired version to be resistant to the BellCoRe attack, which was considered a "challenging issue" by the authors of the countermeasure themselves.Comment: arXiv admin note: substantial text overlap with arXiv:1401.817

The largest singletons of set partitions

Recently, Deutsch and Elizalde studied the largest and the smallest fixed points of permutations. Motivated by their work, we consider the analogous problems in set partitions. Let $A_{n,k}$ denote the number of partitions of $\{1,2,\dots, n+1\}$ with the largest singleton $\{k+1\}$ for $0\leq k\leq n$. In this paper, several explicit formulas for $A_{n,k}$, involving a Dobinski-type analog, are obtained by algebraic and combinatorial methods, many combinatorial identities involving $A_{n,k}$ and Bell numbers are presented by operator methods, and congruence properties of $A_{n,k}$ are also investigated. It will been showed that the sequences $(A_{n+k,k})_{n\geq 0}$ and $(A_{n+k,k})_{k\geq 0}$ (mod $p$) are periodic for any prime $p$, and contain a string of $p-1$ consecutive zeroes. Moreover their minimum periods are conjectured to be $N_p=\frac{p^p-1}{p-1}$ for any prime $p$.Comment: 14page

Surface Entanglement in Quantum Spin Networks

We study the ground-state entanglement in systems of spins forming the boundary of a quantum spin network in arbitrary geometries and dimensionality. We show that as long as they are weakly coupled to the bulk of the network, the surface spins are strongly entangled, even when distant and non directly interacting, thereby generalizing the phenomenon of long-distance entanglement occurring in quantum spin chains. Depending on the structure of the couplings between surface and bulk spins, we discuss in detail how the patterns of surface entanglement can range from multi-pair bipartite to fully multipartite. In the context of quantum information and communication, these results find immediate application to the implementation of quantum routers, that is devices able to distribute quantum correlations on demand among multiple network nodes.Comment: 8 pages, 8 figure