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Beat being
Sometimes curious coincidences happen. The number of our wonderful newspaper on October 4 with my note about David Boma was released, as the Nobel Physics Prize winners were immediately announced. And it was awarded to three scientists who in practice showed that Boma’s views are most likely wrong. The essence of their work can be found out from an interview with Boris Stern with Stanislav Straup or from the excellent article by Alexei Levin on the site "Elements.ru" 1 .
In the collection “Science and the Maximum Reality”, an article 2 of one of the laureates - Austrian physicist Anton Tsailinger, which was published almost ten years ago. The collection is dedicated to the anniversary of John Archibald Wieler and contains reports read on the symposium in March 2002 on the occasion of its 90th anniversary. The anniversary himself was present at the symposium, which, given his venerable age, is rare. (One of the exceptions is a conference on the 90th anniversary of the linguist Yuri Derynikovich Apresyan 3.-Ed. )
Since the preparation of this article, 20 years have passed before the Nobel Prize was awarded to him, so it would seem that there was nothing to remember it, because since then he has published a lot more, but his views are very clearly, simply and clearly outlined there. Let me give you extensive quotes practically without comment.
Here, for example, as Cailinger perceives reality in the quantum theory: “ When choosing a device, the experimenter determines whether this phenomenon will be observed as a wave or as a particle, and, as soon as the choice is made, nature gives an appropriate answer, and the other alternative disappears forever. So, we can conclude that the experimenter can determine the choice of the device, which characteristic will become a reality in the experiment. In this sense, the choice made by the experimenter makes the component to reality, but should be strictly warned against the subjective interpretation of the role of the experimenter or observer. It is clear that the observer’s consciousness in no way affects the particle, unlike the widespread but unsuccessful interpretation of quantum theory . ”
Cailinger completely agrees with the views of Niels Bora, who once said: “ There is no quantum world. There is only an abstract quantum physical description. It is incorrect to think that the task of physics is to discover how nature works. Physics is what we can say about nature . ”
On this basis, Cailinger draws the following conclusion: “What question we formulate, asks the limits of our potential knowledge about the world. This means that both in scientific activity and in everyday life we collect information about the world, information that can always be divided into questions and answers or a number of assumptions such as “truly/false” ”.
Hence, his approach to information is directly followed.
“ Such a gigantic system as a galaxy requires for its full description of a colossal number of bits of information. But what happens to information as the size of the system decreases? Obviously, when dividing the system into two parts, it is reasonable to assume that half of the information will be required to describe each half. Therefore, we will divide the system into more and smaller parts, so the number of bits of the information required to describe the system will decrease steadily. It is clear that in the end we will come to the fundamental limit, and this limit is achieved when the system carries only one bit of information. Obviously, there can no longer be less. It is reasonable to then determine the most elementary system as follows: the most elementary system carries one bit of information. ”
“Our remark that the most elementary system carries only one bit of information simply means that it can only answer one question or report the truth or falsity of only one statement. Now we can show how this innocent consideration leads to an understanding of such fundamental concepts as additional, an accident of individual quantum events and confusion. ”
“Our idea that the most elementary system carries only one bit of information leads to a natural understanding of confusion. The concept of confusion (in German Verschränkung) was introduced by Erwin Schrödinger, and he called it the most significant feature of quantum physics. The confusing state in the simplest case has two quantum battles, or a cubit, bearing the value of the bit “0” or “1”. A confusing state means that if the first cubes bears the value of the bit “0” or “1”, then the second cubes bears a different value of the bit “1” or “0”, so that there is a complete correlation between both. A physically cubit can be any dichomatic (that is, two -level) observed, for example, electron spin, polarization of a photon or a particle path in the interferometer. The most important thing is that the described state is a coherent superposition of two opportunities, and not just a statistical mixture. ”
“To see the connection with information, it makes sense to assume that only two battles of information carry two elementary systems. You can simply assume that each bit of information is a possible measurement result for each elementary system in itself. We will call it local coding. In this case, any relationship between the possible results of both measurements is only a consequence of the information transferred by each individual system. For example, if you use two battles, each of which determines the spin along the z axis, then it is unambiguously determined how the dimensions of the back along this axis are correlated with each other. This is, obviously, an additional bit of information, but this is not independent information, but a direct consequence of the method of encoding information in two systems in themselves. ”
“But there may be completely different situations. Instead of determining the information transferred by each system individually, both bats can be used to represent only how the measurement results made over two systems correlate. Then the condition is only determined by the two statements: “Two qubits are orthogonal in the selected basis” and “Two cubes are orthogonal in the conjugated basis”.
“So, we used two battles of information; The statements are obviously independent of each other, and there was no information left to determine the results of measurements of individual systems in themselves. Since there was no information left for determining individual systems as such, the result of the measurement of each individual system in itself should be completely random, as is prescribed by quantum mechanics. This is the mystery of confusion, set out exactly along the Schrödinger. ”
“Thus, it turns out that the measurement results are completely correlated, although individual systems do not carry any information at all. We showed how our principle of limb of information, together with this method of distribution of information between the two systems, directly leads to an intuitive understanding of confusion. ”
“So, we saw that the most fundamental conceptual concepts or consequences of quantum mechanics can easily be understood on the basis of our determination of the most fundamental system as a basic element of information - a bit. It remains only to analyze the concept of “system”. It is seductive to assume that the system in our sense is something that exists with all its properties in itself and regardless of observation. However, with a neat consideration of the concept of an elementary system, it turns out that it is only that in a specific experimental situation is characterized by information. Therefore, the system is only something that the information belongs to. In other words, there is nothing besides this information. ”
Cailinger believes that the position according to which in the outside world there is still some kind of reality, independent of what we know about it, is devoid of meaning.
“ It is obvious that any property or characteristic of reality“ there on the outside ”can only be based on the information we receive. There is no and cannot be a single statement about the world or reality without such information . ”
“In other words, it is impossible to operationally separate reality from information. So, following the principle of razor Occam, the idea of their difference must be discarded, since the idea of the existence of such a difference gives nothing that could not be obtained without it. Therefore, studying the fundamental elements of information, we automatically study the fundamental elements of the whole world. We have already seen earlier that any presentation of information is based on bits. Any object seems to be a colossal number of bits. In the transition to more and smaller objects, we need to come to the fact that such objects can be characterized by one bat, two bits, three bits, etc., that is, the information is quanted in the values of “truly/false”. From the point of view of our idea that information and reality are essentially the same thing, reality should also be quanted. In other words, quantization in physics is the same as quantizing information. ”
Perhaps the quotes given are enough to make up the view of the views on the reality of one of the Nobel laureates in physics of 2022.
How to relate to them - to judge readers.
Vitaly Matsarsky
1 elementy.ru/novosti_nauki/434024/nobelevskaya_premiya_po_fizike_2022
2 Cailinger A. Where is the quant? "IT" from "Bit"? Interactive universe? Three provision problems of John Archibald Wyler in their connection with the experiment // Science and ultimate reality: quantum theory, cosmology and complexity / Ed. J. Barrow, P. Davis, C. Harper-Ml. - M. - Izhevsk: Iki, 2013. - S. 171–186.