The Jelly and the Shot: Laying down the Law for Pragmatism in Quantum Physics

Claudio Garola

Manuel Bächtold

Abstract This chapter defends an overtly pragmatic version of a Best System account of laws. David Albert and Barry Loewer’s version of such an account is critically examined, and it is argued that the account’s pragmatic dimension is in tension with the foundationalism to which Albert and Loewer also subscribe.

Boon Hwee Kee, Chee Kiat Seow, David Sanan +1 more

WiFi RSSI fingerprinting is a cost-effective indoor localization technique leveraging existing infrastructure, but it suffers from time-varying signal fluctuations that degrade accuracy. This paper proposes a quantum-enhanced fingerprinting approach using a Swap Test for cosine similarity and a quantum oracle that encodes offline fingerprints in superposition for parallel comparison with online measurements. To mitigate RSSI noise, we introduce a PCA-based preprocessing that projects RSSI data into a lower-dimensional subspace, maximizing the angular separation of fingerprints and improving classification. Experiments on a Qiskit simulator demonstrate that our quantum fingerprinting method achieves improved localization accuracy as the number of measurement shots increases, leveraging quantum parallelism. To our knowledge, this is the first detailed implementation of quantum fingerprinting for indoor localization in Qiskit, laying the foundation for quantum-based positioning.

Sébastien Poinat

Jan Faye

The Copenhagen interpretation is first and foremost associated with Niels Bohr's philosophy of quantum mechanics. In this paper, I attempt to lay out what I see as Bohr's pragmatic approach to science in general and to quantum physics in particular. A part of this approach is his claim that the classical concepts are indispensable for our understanding of all physical phenomena, and it seems as if the claim is grounded in his reflection upon how the evolution of language is adapted to experience. Another, recent interpretation, QBism, has also found support in Darwin's theory. It may therefore not be surprising that sometimes QBism is said to be of the same breed as the Copenhagen interpretation. By comparing the two interpretations, I conclude, nevertheless, that there are important differences.