Quantum Information and Randomness

The European Physical Journal H, 2021

Determinism is generally regarded as one of the main characteristics of classical physics, that is, the physics of the eighteenth and nineteenth century. However, an inquiry into eighteenth and nineteenth century physics shows that the aim of accounting for all phenomena on the basis of deterministic equations of motion remained far out of reach. Famous statements of universal determinism, such as those of Laplace and Du Bois-Reymond, were made within a specific context and research program, and did not represent a majority view. I argue that in this period, determinism was often an expectation rather than an established result, and that towards the late nineteenth and early twentieth century, it more and more took the form of a heuristic principle: physicists such as Mach, Poincaré and Boltzmann regarded determinism as a feature of scientific research, rather than as a claim about the world. It is only retrospectively that an image was created according to which classical physics was uniformly deterministic.

2020

Concept of determinism has had many transformations throughout the history of physics, and it has been so influential in this field. However, with the growth of quantum physics, determinism became a scientific "dilemma" and has created many challenges in various contemporary sciences. If this concept is understood correctly, many misconceptions corresponding to it in natural sciences, especially physics can be removed. The aim of this paper is to investigate this concept analytically to solve the existing problems. To do this, first we consider the terminology of determinism including characteristic, necessary connection, and exact prediction. Then, William James definition of determinism, Laplacian determinism, Popper definition of determinism, causal determinism, logical determinism, epistemic determinism, metaphysical determinism, and theological determinism are introduced. After which, we pay attention to different kinds of determinism including global/local domain, co...

Knowledge and Values, ed. Adam Świeżyński, Wyd. UKSW, Warszawa 2011, pp. 73–94., 2011

The paper revisits the old controversy over causality and determinism and argues, in the first place, that non˗deterministic theories of modern science are largely irrelevant to the philosophical issue of the causality principle. As it seems to be the ‘moral’ of the uncertainty principle, the reason why a deterministic theory cannot be applied to the description of certain physical systems is that it is impossible to capture such properties of the system, which are required by a desired theory. These properties constitute what is called ‘the state’ of a system. However, the notion of a state of a system is relative: it depends on a particular theory which one would like to use to describe given kinds of phenomena. This implies that, even in the case where the desired state of a system is fundamentally impossible to be captured, neither ontological nor epistemological determinism may be excluded. Some following critical considerations are also offered with regard to the claim that uncertainty is “rooted in the things themselves”. The cradle of modern discussions about causality and determinism is, of course, quantum mechanics. Because, as it appears, a judgment on deterministic or non˗deterministic character of a theory can be made only after some interpretation of this theory has been given, the paper briefly reminds some chosen interpretations of quantum mechanics (Schrödinger's, probabilistic, statistical, Copenhagen, and the interpretation of quantum ensembles). Many of such interpretations, offered in the past, have now been rejected, and some gained more credibility than the others. Nonetheless, even the claim that indeterminism is irremovable from the description of the micro-world doesn't imply the rejection of the most general formula of the philosophical causality principle. There is no direct implication between theses of the epistemology of scientific knowledge and those of the ontology of the real world.

Here is analyzed a notion of free-will based on deterministic physical laws, where the freedom comes from delayed refinement of the initial conditions, assumed to be incompletely specified. It is argued that if this hypothesis poses some problems, the same problems appear in the case of free-will based on indeterminist physical laws. Arguments from relativistic cosmology and quantum mechanics are presented, supporting the idea that the initial conditions are not completely specified from the beginning, and they need to be partially delayed, and subsequently refined. This kind of delayed initial conditions mechanism is shown to provide an interpretation of quantum mechanics which offers an alternative to the discontinuous collapse of the wave function, solving by this some problems due to the presumed discontinuity in the unitary evolution. An imaginary experiment meant to establish the existence of free-will is proposed and discussed.

Boston Studies in Philosphy and History of Science, 2007

There were two philosophical breakthroughs that were made during the first decades of the 17th century. One was in the theory of knowledge, or epistemology, which was initiated by Francis Bacon. Another breakthrough was made by Galileo Galilei, in the subject of being and becoming, or of metaphysics. What we call science today appears to me to be the fruit of those two remarkable philosophical breakthroughs. I present a case for this claim.

American Journal of Physics, 1963

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