Quantum mechanics derived from information and computation

Friday 15 November 2013
In their recently published paper entitled 'Existence Of An Information Unit As A Postulate Of Quantum Theory', Lluís Masanes and collaborators have derived quantum mechanics from a few postulates based on the properties that a unit of information has. 

The main idea is that information exists, and it comes in fundamental units. From the properties of this information units, called gbits, or general bits, they derive quantum mechanics. 

The main properties of this information units are: 1. Continuous reversibility, that is, for any system, and for every pair of pure states one can in principle engineer a time-continuous reversible dynamics which brings one state to the other. 2. Tomographic locality, or the possibility of constructing the state of a composite system from the simple states that form it. 3. No simultaneous encoding. It means that each gbit encodes an only information unit. 

And that's all. They find that the only generalized probability theory that is compatible with these postulates is quantum theory. They do not say what information is. They only say the requirements this information unit should have in order to derive quantum mechanics. 

This approach gives a computational point of view of the Universe. According to the authors “Any physical process can be simulated with a suitably programmed general purpose simulator.” If that's true, we could be living in a simulation

Full article here.

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