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PhilSci-Archive: No conditions. Results ordered -Date Deposited.
Sat Apr 22 2023 01:00:15 (8 hours)
# 1.
Ruiz de Olano, Pablo (2023) Confirmation, or Pursuit-worthiness? Lessons from J. J. Sakurai’s 1960 Theory of the Strong Force for the Debate on Non-Empirical Physics. Studies in History and Philosophy of Modern Physics, 99. pp. 77-88. ISSN 1355-2198
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Cameron C. Yetman
Fri Apr 21 2023 12:04:42 (21 hours)
# 2.
The following annotated bibliography contains a reasonably complete survey of contemporary work in the philosophy of astrophysics. Spanning approximately forty years from the early 1980s to the present day, the bibliography should help researchers entering the field to acquaint themselves with its major texts, while providing an opportunity for philosophers already working on astrophysics to expand their knowledge base and engage with unfamiliar material.
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O. Cristi Stoica, Iulian D. Toader
Fri Apr 21 2023 12:04:41 (21 hours)
# 3.
This paper explains why spacetime singularities do not constitute a breakdown of physical laws, and points out that the difference between the metrics at singularities and those outside of singularities is factual, rather than nomological.
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Aleksander M. Kubicki, Alex May, David Pérez-Garcia,
Fri Apr 21 2023 12:04:40 (21 hours)
# 4.
Within the setting of the AdS/CFT correspondence, we ask about the power of computers in the presence of gravity. We show that there are computations on $n$ qubits which cannot be implemented inside of black holes with entropy less than $O(2^n)$. To establish our claim, we argue computations happening inside the black hole must be implementable in a programmable quantum processor, so long as the inputs and description of the unitary to be run are not too large. We then prove a bound on quantum processors which shows many unitaries cannot be implemented inside the black hole, and further show some of these have short descriptions and act on small systems. These unitaries with short descriptions must be computationally forbidden from happening inside the black hole.
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Dimitrios Psaltis (Georgia Tech)
Fri Apr 21 2023 12:04:39 (21 hours)
# 5.
The Kerr-Newman metric is the unique vacuum solution of the General Relativistic field equations, in which any singularities or spacetime pathologies are hidden behind horizons. They are believed to describe the spacetimes of massive astrophysical objects with no surfaces, which we call black holes. This spacetime, which is defined entirely by the mass, spin, and charge of the black hole, gives rise to a variety of phenomena in the motion of particles and photons outside the horizons that have no Newtonian counterparts. Moreover, the Kerr-Newman spacetime remains remarkably resilient to many attempts in modifying the underlying theory of gravity. The monitoring of stellar orbits around supermassive black holes, the detection of gravitational waves from the coalescence of stellar-mass black holes, and the observation of black-hole shadows in images with horizon-scale resolution, all of which have become possible during the last decade, are offering valuable tools in testing quantitatively the predictions of this remarkable solution to Einstein’s equations.
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Chris Fields, James F. Glazebrook
Fri Apr 21 2023 12:04:38 (21 hours)
# 6.
We study the relationship between assumptions of state separability and both preparation and measurement contextuality, and the relationship of both of these to the frame problem, the problem of predicting what does not change in consequence of an action. We state a quantum analog of the latter and prove its undecidability. We show how contextuality is generically induced in state preparation and measurement by basis choice, thermodynamic exchange, and the imposition of a priori causal models, and how fine-tuning assumptions appear ubiquitously in settings characterized as non-contextual.
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Anna Ijjas
Fri Apr 21 2023 12:04:36 (21 hours)
# 7.
Using the power of numerical relativity, we show that, beginning from generic initial conditions that are far from flat, homogeneous and isotropic and have a large Weyl curvature, a period of slow contraction rapidly drives spacetime towards vanishingly small Weyl curvature as the total energy density grows, thus providing a dynamical mechanism that satisfies the Weyl Curvature Hypothesis. We also demonstrate a tight correlation between the Weyl Curvature Hypothesis and ultralocal behavior for canonical scalar fields with a sufficiently steep negative potential energy density.
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Philipp Strasberg, Teresa E. Reinhard, Joseph Schindler
Fri Apr 21 2023 12:04:29 (21 hours)
# 8.
Within the histories formalism the decoherence functional is a formal tool to investigate the emergence of classicality in isolated quantum systems, yet an explicit evaluation of it from first principles has not been reported. We provide such an evaluation for up to five-time histories based on exact numerical diagonalization. We find emergent classicality for slow and coarse observables of a non-integrable many-body system and extract a finite size scaling law by varying the Hilbert space dimension over four orders of magnitude. Specifically, we conjecture and observe an exponential suppression of quantum effects as a function of the particle number of the system. This suggests a solution to the preferred basis problem of the many worlds interpretation within a minimal theoretical framework, without relying on environmentally induced decoherence, quantum Darwinism, Markov approxmations or ensemble averages. We discuss the implications of our results for the wave function of the Universe, interpretations of quantum mechanics and the arrow(s) of time.
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Daniel Harlow
Fri Apr 21 2023 12:04:24 (21 hours)
# 9.
This chapter gives an overview of the quantum aspects of black holes, focusing on the black hole information problem, the counting of black hole entropy in string theory, and the emergence of spacetime in holography. It is aimed at a broad physics audience, and does not presuppose knowledge of string theory or holography.
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PhilSci-Archive: No conditions. Results ordered -Date Deposited.
Thu Apr 20 2023 01:33:21 (2 days)
# 10.
Penchev, Vasil (2023) The 2022 Nobel Prize in physics for entanglement and quantum information: the new revolution in quantum mechanics and science. [Preprint]
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Joshua G. Fenwick, Rainer Dick
Wed Apr 19 2023 13:11:45 (2 days)
# 11.
Imposing the Born rule as a fundamental principle of quantum mechanics would require the existence of normalizable wave functions also for relativistic particles. Indeed, the Fourier transforms of normalized k-space amplitudes yield normalized x-space wave packets which reproduce the standard k-space expectation values for energy and momentum from local momentum pseudo-densities. However, in the case of bosonic fields, the wave packets are nonlocally related to the corresponding relativistic quantum fields, and therefore the canonical local energy-momentum densities differ from the pseudo-densities and appear nonlocal in terms of the wave packets. We examine the relation between the canonical energy density, the canonical charge density, the energy pseudo-density, and the Born density for the massless free Klein-Gordon field. We find that those four proxies for particle location are tantalizingly close even in this extremely relativistic case: In spite of their nonlocal mathematical relations, they are mutually local in the sense that their maxima do not deviate beyond a common position uncertainty $\Delta x$. Indeed, they are practically indistinguishable in cases where we would expect a normalized quantum state to produce particle-like position signals, viz. if we are observing quanta with momenta $p\gg\Delta p\ge\hbar/2\Delta x$. We also translate our results to massless Dirac fields. Our results confirm and illustrate that the normalized energy density provides a suitable measure for positions of bosons, whereas normalized charge density provides a suitable measure for fermions.
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Iulian D. Toader
Wed Apr 19 2023 13:11:44 (2 days)
# 12.
This paper provides an algebraic reconstruction of Einstein’s own argument for the incompleteness of quantum mechanics — the one that he thought did not make it into the EPR paper — in order to clarify the assumptions that underlie an understanding of Einstein completeness as categoricity, the sense in which it is a type of descriptive completeness, and some of the various ways in which it has been more often misconstrued.
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PhilSci-Archive: No conditions. Results ordered -Date Deposited.
Wed Apr 19 2023 05:38:39 (3 days)
# 13.
Horvat, Sebastian and Toader, Iulian Danut (2023) Carnap on Quantum Mechanics. [Preprint]
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PhilSci-Archive: No conditions. Results ordered -Date Deposited.
Wed Apr 19 2023 05:38:17 (3 days)
# 14.
Horvat, Sebastian and Toader, Iulian Danut (2023) An Alleged Tension between Quantum Logic and Applied Classical Mathematics. [Preprint]
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Wed Apr 19 2023 05:37:51 (3 days)
# 15.
Horvat, Sebastian and Toader, Iulian Danut (2023) Quantum logic and meaning. [Preprint]
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Mathias Van Den Bossche, Philippe Grangier
Tue Apr 18 2023 09:49:17 (3 days)
# 16.
Within the framework of quantum contextuality, we discuss the ideas of extracontextuality and extravalence, that allow one to relate Kochen-Specker’s and Gleason’s theorems. We emphasize that whereas Kochen-Specker’s is essentially a no-go theorem, Gleason’s provides a mathematical justification of Born’s rule. Our extracontextual approach requires however a way to describe the “Heisenberg cut”. Following an article by John von Neumann on infinite tensor products, this can be done by noticing that the usual formalism of quantum mechanics, associated with unitary equivalence of representations, stops working when countable infinities of particles (or degrees of freedom) are encountered. This is because the dimension of the corresponding Hilbert space becomes uncountably infinite, leading to the loss of unitary equivalence, and to sectorisation. Such an intrinsically contextual approach provides a unified mathematical model including both quantum and classical physics, that appear as required incommensurable facets in the description of nature.
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Sebastian Horvat, Iulian Danut Toader
Tue Apr 18 2023 09:49:16 (3 days)
# 17.
This paper gives a formulation of quantum logic in the abstract algebraic setting laid out by Dunn and Hardegree (2001). On this basis, it provides a comparative analysis of viable quantum logical bivalent semantics and their classical counterparts, thereby showing that the truth-functional status of classical and quantum connectives is not as different as usually thought. Then, after pointing out the seemingly forgotten fact that bivalence in quantum logic can be maintained, albeit at the price of truth-functionality, it argues that Hellman (1980) fails to show that this lack of truth-functionality entails a change of meaning between classical and quantum logical connectives. Finally, the paper proposes a meaning-variance argument that fares better on our analysis.
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PhilSci-Archive: No conditions. Results ordered -Date Deposited.
Tue Apr 18 2023 00:50:34 (4 days)
# 18.
Goyal, Philip (2022) The Role of Reconstruction in the Elucidation of Quantum Theory. [Preprint]
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Leonardo Levinas
Mon Apr 17 2023 12:03:40 (4 days)
# 19.
In the famous thought experiment studied in this article, Galileo attempted to refute the Aristotelian hypothesis that heavier bodies should fall more quickly than lighter ones. After pointing out some inconsistencies in Galileo’s approach, we show, through the design of two alternative but equivalent experiments, that from his imaginary experiment, it is not possible to reach the conclusion that all bodies fall simultaneously. We show why, to explain the result of this type of experience, it is necessary to establish the equivalence between inertial and gravitational masses derived exclusively from experience.
