Volume 1, Issue 1, pages 44-55
Lee Smolin [Show Biography]
Born in New York City, Prof. Lee Smolin was educated at Hampshire College and Harvard University. He was formerly a professor at Yale, Syracuse and Penn State Universities and held postdoctoral positions at the Institute for Advanced Study, Princeton, the Institute for Theoretical Physics, Santa Barbara and the Enrico Fermi Institute, the University of Chicago. He has been a visiting professor at Imperial College London and has held various visiting positions at Oxford and Cambridge Universities and the Universities of Rome and Trento, and SISSA, in Italy. Since 2001, he has been a founding and senior faculty member at Perimeter Institute for Theoretical Physics. Prof. Smolin works mainly on the problem of quantum gravity. He also has contributed to cosmology, the foundations of quantum mechanics, astrophysics, theoretical biology, philosophy of science and, recently, economics.
A new interpretation of quantum mechanics is proposed according to which precedence, freedom and novelty play central roles. This is based on a modification of the postulates for quantum theory given by Masanes and Muller. We argue that quantum mechanics is uniquely characterized as the probabilistic theory in which individual systems have maximal freedom in their responses to experiment, given reasonable axioms for the behavior of probabilities in a physical theory. Thus, to the extent that quantum systems are free, in the sense of Conway and Kochen, there is a sense in which they are maximally free. We also propose that laws of quantum evolution arise from a principle of precedence according to which the outcome of a measurement on a quantum system is selected randomly from the ensemble of outcomes of previous instances of the same measurement on the same quantum system. This implies that dynamical laws for quantum systems can evolve as the universe evolves, because new precedents are generated by the formation of new entangled states.
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M. P. Mueller and L. Masanes,
A derivation of quantum theory from physical requirements, arXiv: 1004.1483, New J. Phys.13:063001, 2011.
L. Smolin, A real ensemble interpretation of quantum mechanics, arXiv: 1104.2822.
L. Smolin, Unification of the state with the dynamical law, arXiv: 1201.2632.
M. P. Mueller and L. Masanes, Information-theoretic postulates for quantum theory, arXiv: 1203.4516.
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