Search Talks

The progression of theories suggested for our world, from ego- to geo- to helio-centric models to universe and multiverse theories and beyond, shows one tendency: The size of the described worlds increases, with humans being expelled from their center to ever more remote and random locations. If pushed too far, a potential theory of everything (TOE) is actually more a theories of nothing (TON). Indeed such theories have already been developed. I show that including observer localization into such theories is necessary and sufficient to avoid this problem. I develop a quantitative recipe to identify TOEs and distinguish them from TONs and theories in-between. This precisely shows what the problem is with some recently suggested universal TOEs.

In this talk I compare the normative concept of probability at the heart of QBism with the notion of probability implied by the use of Solomonoff induction in Markus Mueller's preprint arXiv:1712.01816.

Algorithmic information theory (AIT) delivers an objective quantification of simplicity-qua-compressibility,that was employed by Solomonoff (1964) to specify a gold standard of inductive inference. Or so runs the conventional account,that I will challenge in my talk.

In this talk we describe a general procedure for associating a minimal informationally-complete quantum measurement (or MIC) with a probabilistic representation of quantum theory. Towards this, we make use of the idea that the Born Rule is a consistency criterion among subjectively assigned probabilities rather than a tool to set purely physically mandated probabilities. In our setting, the difference between quantum theory and classical statistical physics is the way their physical assumptions augment bare probability theory: Classical statistical physics corresponds to a trivial augmentation, while quantum theory makes crucial use of the Born Rule. We prove that the representation of the Born Rule obtained from a symmetric informationally-complete measurement (or SIC) minimizes the distinction between the two theories in at least two senses, one functional, the other geometric. Our results suggest that this representation supplies a natural vantage point from which to identify their essential differences, and, perhaps thereby, a set of physical postulates reflecting the quantum nature of the world.

In his famous thought experiment, Wigner assigns an entangled state to the composite quantum system made up of Wigner's friend and her observed system. While the two of them have different accounts of the process, each Wigner and his friend can in principle verify his/her respective state assignments by performing an appropriate measurement. As manifested through a click in a detector or a specific position of the pointer, the outcomes of these measurements can be regarded as reflecting directly observable "facts". Reviewing arXiv:1507.05255, I will derive a no-go theorem for observer-independent facts, which would be common both for Wigner and the friend. I will then analyze this result in the context of a newly derived theorem in arXiv:1604.07422, where Frauchiger and Renner prove that "single-world interpretations of quantum theory cannot be self-consistent". It is argued that "self-consistency" has the same implications as the assumption that observational statements of different observers can be compared in a single (and hence an observer-independent) theoretical framework. The latter, however, may not be possible, if the statements are to be understood as relational in the sense that their determinacy is relative to an observer.