April 2014 - philphysmunich

Quantum Information Theory Reading Group at LMU
by Michael Cuffaro July 13, 2014

July 13, 2014

Dear all, the Summer 2014 reading group on Quantum Information Theory will begin this coming Monday, April 14th, from 18:00 - 20:00 (CT). After that we will meet bi-weekly. The location is Ludwigstraße 31, Room 021. The first part of the meeting on Monday will be devoted to organisational matters and to discussing subsequent meeting topics. During the second part of the meeting, *Seamus Bradley* will introduce us to *Classical Information Theory*. As background reading, you may want to look at Parts I and II of Claude Shannon's "A Mathematical Theory of Communication" (1948). It can be downloaded from: http://cm.bell-labs.com/cm/ms/what/shannonday/shannon1948.pdf Everyone interested in the topic of quantum information theory is encouraged to attend the group. Please also feel free to distribute this to anyone not subscribed to this mailing list who you think may be interested in attending. If you are receiving this email twice because you belong to this mailing list but are explicitly included in the Cc list, please let me know and I will remove you from the latter. I hope to see many of you next week. Best wishes, -- Michael Cuffaro Postdoctoral Fellow Ludwig-Maximilians-Universität München Fakultät für Philosophie, Wissenschaftstheorie und Religionswissenschaft Lehrstuhl für Wissenschaftstheorie Munich Center for Mathematical Philosophy Geschwister-Scholl-Platz 1 80539 München, Deutschland http://www.michaelcuffaro.com

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Talk by Douglas Stone at ASC (Apr 30)
by Dardashti, Radin April 28, 2014

April 28, 2014

Speaker: A. Douglas Stone (Yale) Wednesday 30th Apr 2014 Location: Room A348/349, Theresienstr. 37/III Time: 16:15 - 17:45 Title: Einstein and Quantum Mechanics: Its Not What You Think Abstract: Einstein is well known for his rejection of quantum mechanics in the form it emerged from the work of Heisenberg, Born and Schrodinger in 1926. Much less appreciated are the many seminal contributions he made to quantum theory prior to his final scientific verdict, that the theory was at best incomplete. In this talk I present an overview of Einsteins many conceptual breakthroughs and place them in his- torical context. I argue that Einstein, much more than Planck, in- troduced the concept of quantization of energy in atomic mechanics. Einstein proposed the photon, the first force-carrying particle dis- covered for a fundamental interaction, and put forward the notion of wave-particle duality, based on sound statistical arguments 14 years before De Broglies work. He was the first to recognize the intrinsic randomness in atomic processes, and introduced the notion of tran- sition probabilities, embodied in the A and B coefficients for atomic emission and absorption. He also preceded Born in suggesting the interpretation of wave fields as probability densities for particles, pho- tons, in the case of the electromagnetic field. Finally, stimulated by Bose, he introduced the notion of indistinguishable particles in the quantum sense and derived the condensed phase of bosons, which is one of the fundamental states of matter at low temperatures. His work on quantum statistics in turn directly stimulated Schrodinger towards his discovery of the wave equation of quantum mechanics. It was only due to his rejection of the final theory that he is not gener- ally recognized as the most central figure in this historic achievement of human civilization.

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SimTech Workshop -Entanglement and Speed-up: Philosophical Issues in Quantum Computing
by Giacomo Lini April 11, 2014

April 11, 2014

Workshop title: Entanglement and Speed-up: Philosophical Issues in Quantum Computing Date and Venue: 9th, May, 2014. University of Stuttgart, Room 17.11, Kepplerstr. 1st floor Unofficial Schedule: 10:00 -11:00 Giovanni Cinà (ILLC, University of Amsterdam): CONNECTING THE CATEGORICAL AND THE MODAL LOGIC APPROACHES TO QUANTUM MECHANICS 11:15 -12:15 Michael Esfeld (University of Lausanne ): STRUCTURAL REALISM AND THE EXPLANATION OF QUANTUM NON-LOCALITY 13:45-14:45 Hans Briegel (University of Innsbruck): TO BE ANNOUNCED 15:00-16:00: Michael Cuffaro (University of Munich): THE PHYSICAL AND COMPUTATIONAL SIGNIFICANCE OF THE BELL INEQUALITIES Short abstracts of the talks are available for consultation at the following website: http://quantumworkshopstuttgart.wordpress.com Anyone interested in participating is very welcome, but kindly asked to register by sending an email to the following mailboxes: giacomo.lini(a)philo.uni-stuttgart.de ulrike.pompe-alama(a)philo.uni-stuttgart.de Overview: Since their rising, quantum computational methods have been a matter of interest for physicists, mathematicians, and philosophers. This is due to the fact that quantum computing is a result of the combined research efforts of multiple disciplines, and its applications can provide a lot of benefits in both the practical and the theoretical domain. One of the most discussed topics is related to the origins of what is generally called “speed up”, i.e. the ability of a quantum computer to outperform its classical counterparts. In the last years, the description of the so-called cluster state quantum computer and some works on the dequantisation of quantum algorithms have at least undermined – if not defeated – the general idea that at the crudest level, quantum computation is just quantum parallelism. The aim of this workshop is to bring together physicists, mathematicians and philosophers and to consider the possible consequences of exalting the role of quantum entanglement at a computational and metaphysical level, highlighting in which sense the discussion about computational speed up can be fruitfully exploited for quantum theory and its interpretation.

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