Shannon's notion of relative information between two physical systems can function as foundation for statistical mechanics and quantum mechanics, without referring to subjectivism or idealism. It can also represent a key missing element in the foundation of the naturalistic picture of the world, providing the conceptual tool for dealing with its apparent limitations. I comment on the relation between these ideas and Democritus.
Shannon's notion of relative information between two physical systems can function as foundation for statistical mechanics and quantum mechanics, without referring to subjectivism or idealism. It can also represent a key missing element in the foundation of the naturalistic picture of the world, providing the conceptual tool for dealing with its apparent limitations. I comment on the relation between these ideas and Democritus.
We shall draw an affirmative answer to the question posed in the title.The key point will be a quantum description of physical reality.Once fixed at ontic level two basic elements, namely the laws of physics and the matter, we argue that the underlying physical reality emerges from the interconnection between these two elements.We consider any physical process, including measurement, modeled by unitary evolution.In this context, we will deduce quantum randomness as a consequence of inclusion of the observer into the quantum system.The global picture of the universe is in a sense deterministic, but from our own local perspective (as part of the system) we perceive quantum mechanical randomness.Then, the notion of "information" turns out to be a derivative concept.I've spent much more time thinking about the photon problem [i.e., about quantum theory] than about relativity. A. Einstein
Information is on everyone's lips.It seems that nowadays there is no philosophical or scientific inquiry that cannot benefit from a reformulation in terms of information theory (IT).Quantum theory (QT) is no exception.Indeed, one of the liveliest debates in the foundations of QT concerns the role that information may play in the solution of the well-known problems in the foundations of QT.For instance, one of the hottest discussions concerns quantum non-locality.On the one hand, IT folks stress how, rather than approaching non-local entanglement as an 'embarrassment', IT invites us to see it as a resource for new information-processing protocols.On the other hand, it is unclear how this invitation can contribute to the solution of the problem of accounting for the apparent nonlocality involved in quantum correlations.Christopher G. Timpson's beautiful book is a welcome contribution to this dialectic.It provides an admirable mix of conceptual and technical analysis of the notion of information and critically analyses the most prominent proposals on the table in the debate over the role of IT in the foundations of QT.Although the focus of Timpson's book is quantum information theory (QIT) and the foundations of QT, a considerable component of its basic precepts will be found extremely useful in any branch (be it more philosophical or more scientific) of applied IT.It is because of this additional value that in this review, sometimes to detriment of exhaustiveness, I prefer to concentrate on providing some samples of Timpson's main argumentative line.This should give a better idea of how this volume can represent valuable reading for both specialists in QIT and non-specialists.First things first.In chapter 2, Timpson provides a sharp analysis of the concepts of information.The plural is due to the necessary distinction between information in the everyday sense and information in the technical sense (informationt).Both are abstract mass nouns, but while the former refers to a semantic and epistemic notion, informationt is a physically defined quantity, measured classically by Shannon information.Informationt is usually described as an undefined notion.Contrary to this claim, at the roots of Timpson's analysis is a neat definition: 'Informationt is what is produced by an informationt source that is required to be reproducible at the destination if the transmission is to be counted a success' (22).Although avowedly deflationary, this definition provides a fertile background to dissipate much of the fog around the nature of informationt and its behaviour.It actually turns out that the majority of the results of this book pivots on this very simple definition.Here is a straightforward example.According to the definition above, a successful transmission requires that the message be reproducible at destination.However, what it is said to be repeatable is not the token of a message, but the type.When we talk about something that is transmitted in communication protocols (the so-called pieces of information) we refer to types, i.e. abstracta, rather than to concrete objects.The operation of conceptual cleansing continues when we pass from classical to quantum informationt (chapter 3).An especially noteworthy result is the rejection of the common view that quantum informationt is different in nature from classical informationt.Timpson's methodology allows instead to account for it as an extension of Shannon informationt.In fact, with the template of classical informationt at hand, Timpson reconstructs the notions of quantum informationt source, measure of quantum informationt and piece of quantum informationt, the latter being a sequence of Hilbert space states.
We argue that Anton Zeilinger's "foundational conceptual principle" for quantum mechanics according to which an elementary system carries one bit of information is an idealistic principle, which should be replaced by a realistic principle of contextuality. Specific properties of quantum systems are a consequence of impossibility to speak about them without reference to the tools of their observation (identification) and, consequently, context in which these tools are applied. In particular, the assumption of non-locality is not required to explain quantum correlation. Correlated quantum events are related with each other in a causal way. But this is not classical, but quantum causality expressed by an entangled wave function. This or that particular correlation does not arise in measurement; in measurement it is identified in context. In contrast to Zeilinger's proposed principle of quantization of information, the principle of contextuality explains it realistically.
Introduction Of John Wheeler's “Really Big Questions,” the one on which the most progress has been made is “It from bit?” – does information play a significant role at the foundations of physics? It is perhaps less ambitious than some of the other questions, such as “How come existence?”, because it does not necessarily require a metaphysical answer. And unlike, say, “Why the quantum?”, it does not require the discovery of new laws of nature: there was room for hope that it might be answered through a better understanding of the laws as we currently know them, particularly those of quantum physics. And this is what has happened: the better understanding is the quantum theory of information and computation. How might our conception of the quantum physical world have been different if “It from bit” had been a motivation from the outset? No one knows how to derive it (the nature of the physical world) from bit (the idea that information plays a significant role at the foundations of physics), and I shall argue that this will never be possible. But we can do the next best thing: we can start from the qubit. Qubits To a classical information theorist, a bit is an abstraction: a certain amount of information. To a programmer, a bit is a Boolean variable. To an engineer, a bit is a “flip-flop” – a piece of hardware that is stable in either of two physical states.
At this point in time, two major areas of physics, statistical mechanics and quantum mechanics, rest on the foundations of probability and entropy. The last century saw several significant fundamental advances in our understanding of the process of inference, which make it clear that these are inferential theories. That is, rather than being a description of the behavior of the universe, these theories describe how observers can make optimal predictions about the universe. In such a picture, information plays a critical role. What is more is that little clues, such as the fact that black holes have entropy, continue to suggest that information is fundamental to physics in general. In the last decade, our fundamental understanding of probability theory has led to a Bayesian revolution. In addition, we have come to recognize that the foundations go far deeper and that Cox's approach of generalizing a Boolean algebra to a probability calculus is the first specific example of the more fundamental idea of assigning valuations to partially-ordered sets. By considering this as a natural way to introduce quantification to the more fundamental notion of ordering, one obtains an entirely new way of deriving physical laws. I will introduce this new way of thinking by demonstrating how one can quantify partially-ordered sets and, in the process, derive physical laws. The implication is that physical law does not reflect the order in the universe, instead it is derived from the order imposed by our description of the universe. Information physics, which is based on understanding the ways in which we both quantify and process information about the world around us, is a fundamentally new approach to science.