The Philosophical Problem

Wojciech Piotr Grygiel

The current 50th issue of Philosophical Problems in Science (Zagadnienia Filozoficzne w Nauce) summarizes the efforts of both philosophers and scientists to understand how a broader philosophical context sets the stage for the development of scientific research, with physics playing a leading role. In particular, the paper reviews the content of the last twenty-five issues of the journal with an emphasis on the philosophical problems that arise in the practice of physics. The overview reveals that these problems reflect the main conceptual division in physics between the treatment of the micro-world described by quantum mechanics and the macro-world governed by the general theory of relativity. Both of these theories, taken separately, generate a host of philosophical concerns such as their proper interpretation (Bell’s Theorem and its consequences) or the meaning and the eventual validity of the notions of space and time. Other philosophical problems in physics, such as chaos and determinism, are also considered. The authors are well aware that the formulation of the future theory of quantum gravity will be a demanding task requiring profound philosophical reflection.

Alexei Kojevnikov

Hongfang Li

Schrdinger's cat paradox is superficial look like a philosophical problem in quantum mechanics,actually involves some debates of the basic philosophical problems in the studies of philosophy of science,such as subjectivism vs.objectivism,realism vs.anti-realism.In the recent years,the progress in the studies of Schrdinger's cat paradox have made the cat entanglement state and its decoherence effect become no longer debatable instead observable behavior of physical world,which prompts the studies of basic philosophical problems involved quantum theory among different philosophical school.

Cecilia Flori

Dorit Aharonov, Maor Ganz, Loick Magnin

We provide the first quantum (exact) protocol for the Dining Philosophers problem (DP), a central problem in distributed algorithms. It is well known that the problem cannot be solved exactly in the classical setting. We then use our DP protocol to provide a new quantum protocol for the tightly related problem of exact leader election (LE) on a ring, improving significantly in both time and memory complexity over the known LE protocol by Tani et. al. To do this, we show that in some sense the exact DP and exact LE problems are equivalent; interestingly, in the classical non-exact setting they are not. Hopefully, the results will lead to exact quantum protocols for other important distributed algorithmic questions; in particular, we discuss interesting connections to the ring size problem, as well as to a physically motivated question of breaking symmetry in 1D translationally invariant systems.