Information causality, the Tsirelson bound, and the 'being-thus' of things

Cuffaro, Michael E. (2020): Information causality, the Tsirelson bound, and the 'being-thus' of things. In: Studies in History and Philosophy of Modern Physics, Bd. 72: S. 266-277

Abstract

The principle of 'information causality' can be used to derive an upper bound-known as the 'Tsirelson bound'-on the strength of quantum mechanical correlations, and has been conjectured to be a foundational principle of nature. To date, however, it has not been sufficiently motivated to play such a foundational role. The motivations that have so far been given are, as I argue, either unsatisfactorily vague or appeal to little if anything more than intuition. Thus in this paper I consider whether some way might be found to successfully motivate the principle. And I propose that a compelling way of so doing is to understand it as a generalisation of Einstein's principle of the mutually independent existence-the 'being-thus'-of spatially distant things. In particular I first describe an argument, due to Demopoulos, to the effect that the so-called 'no-signalling' condition can be viewed as a generalisation of Einstein's principle that is appropriate for an irreducibly statistical theory such as quantum mechanics. I then argue that a compelling way to motivate information causality is to in turn consider it as a further generalisation of the Einsteinian principle that is appropriate for a theory of communication. I describe, however, some important conceptual obstacles that must yet be overcome if the project of establishing information causality as a foundational principle of nature is to succeed. (C) 2018 Elsevier Ltd. All rights reserved.

• Dokumententyp: Zeitschriftenartikel
• Fakultät: Biologie
• Themengebiete: 500 Naturwissenschaften und Mathematik > 570 Biowissenschaften; Biologie
• ISSN: 1355-2198
• Sprache: Englisch