Academic literature on the topic 'Quantum theory – Fiction'

AbstractOne interesting application of entanglement is quantum teleportation, which is a technique for transferring an unknown quantum state from one place to another. In science fiction, teleportation generally involves a machine scanning a person and another machine reassembling the person on the other end. The original body disintegrates and no longer exists. Similarly, quantum teleportation works by “scanning” the original qubit, sending a recipe, and reconstructing the qubit elsewhere. The original qubit is not physically destroyed in the science fiction sense, but it is no longer in the same state. Otherwise, the previously mentioned no-cloning theorem—which states that a qubit cannot be exactly copied onto another qubit—would be violated.1 As we will see, the “scanning” part poses a problem which can only be solved by leveraging quantum entanglement.

‘Quantum theory’ is not a single physical theory but a framework in which many different concrete theories fit. As such, a solution to the quantum measurement problem ought to provide a recipe to interpret each such concrete theory, in a mutually consistent way. But with the exception of the Everett interpretation, the main extant solutions either try to make sense of the abstract framework as if it were concrete, or else interpret one particular quantum theory under the fiction that it is fundamental and exact. In either case, these approaches are unable to help themselves to the very theory-laden, level-relative ways in which quantum theory makes contact with experiment in mainstream physics, and so are committed to major revisionary projects which have not been carried out even in outline. As such, only the Everett interpretation is currently suited to make sense of quantum physics as it is found.

Abstract The twentieth century saw Newtonian physics superseded by quantum field theory, a paradigm shift based in scientists’ discovery that matter is dynamic and lively, not inert and static. Feminist materialism begins with the assertion that how people think about matter, matters. How does the discovery of matter’s vitality call into question and permit a reworking of traditional notions of embodiment, agency and causation, and kinship and ethics? In important ways, feminist materialism understands itself as doing science fictional work. Karen Barad and Donna Haraway in particular have been invested in building speculative practices that materially upset the presumed limits of time, space, and bodies. This chapter offers an overview of feminist materialism that demonstrates how its methods and goals resonate with those of science fiction (sf), particularly via a close reading of Shane Carruth’s 2013 experimental sf film Upstream Color.

In the science fiction novel Quarantine, Greg Egan imagines a universe where interactions with human observers collapse quantum wavefunctions. Aliens, unable to collapse wavefunctions, tire of being slaughtered by these collapses. In response they erect an impenetrable shield around the solar system, protecting the rest of the universe from human interference and locking humanity into a starless Bubble. When confronting scientific realism and the quantum, many philosophers try to do the theoretical counterpart of this fictional practical strategy. Quantum mechanics is beset with many hard-to-resolve interpretational challenges. Philosophers—appealing to decoherence and coarse-graining—try to put these in a Bubble and hope that they can go about their philosophizing as before. Chapter 4 aims to burst this Bubble, and then explores ways of eliminating quantum underdetermination, showing that such attempts lead to philosophical gridlock.

Abstract Already in this book one substantial issue has been discussed under the rubric of’realism’ in connection with QT, viz. the issue of whether the state-vectors and density operators of QT represent ‘real’ properties of q-systems. For the purposes of this chapter I take this particular issue to have been settled in favour of realism. But more generally what does it mean to adopt a ‘realist interpretation’of QT? I shall take it to mean accepting that QT is true, that the objects QT refers to (electrons, protons, etc.) exist, that the properties it refers to are ‘real’, and in particular that the physical quantities it refers to are ‘real’; in short it also means that we can interpret QT ‘literally’ in the sense that we can take all its referential terms as genuinely referring and not just as convenient fictions or metaphors for the real.

Abstract Fritz Houtermans’s career was the stuff of fiction. He was German by birth but grew up and studied in Vienna. He was a physicist with, according to his friend Otto Frisch [20], a profound understanding of quantum theory. He pursued his theoretical work in Viennese cafes, where his prodigious capacity for coffee became legendary. His growing reputation took him to Germany, to one of the great centres of theoretical physics in Gottingen. Houtermans was one-quarter Jewish, so that, although he was proud of his ancestry’—’when your ancestors were still living in the trees’, he would tell his Aryan colleagues, ‘mine were already forging cheques’—he was not under threat of racial persecution by the Nazis. He was, however, a committed Communist and for many years a party member, and this would have put his life in danger. He therefore decamped to England, where he worked at the EMI laboratories, and all but discovered the laser (the means, first achieved in 1960, of generating light of a single wavelength with a very high intensity). But life in England was not to his taste and he complained especially’ about the smell of boiled mutton. He moved again, this time to fulfil his old ambition of working in the Soviet Union. He found employment in the Physico-Technical Institute in Kharkov, which then housed a brilliant cluster of physicists, among them the great Lev Landau 1137].

It is a weekend in early January 2009. The location is a medium-sized city in the west of England. It is interesting to compare the scene with the photograph of the officer in the snow in 1974 with which we started this journey. It is bright, sunny, and cold. It is not yet snowing; that would follow the next month. Britain had recently entered an economic recession of fearsome dimensions, although unemployment had not yet returned to the levels of the 1980s. Like in 1974 there is police presence in the town. Two police officers are on foot patrol, but they bear only a passing resemblance to the appearance of the 1974 officer. The 2009 officers are patrolling as a pair, dressed in lightweight fluorescent anoraks. One, a woman, wears a reinforced bowler hat, the other, a man, wears a flat cap. Neither holds the office of constable, for they are both PCSOs. There are police constables aplenty on duty that morning, but they are busy conducting searches following arrests for shoplifting under section 18 of PACE, legislation unknown to the 1974 constable. The PCSOs are equipped with Airwave radios, a quantum leap of technology compared to the primitive devices available 35 years previously. In 1974 officers did not then have guaranteed access to PNC, whereas the 2009 officers enjoy routine and speedy access to PNC and a range of other databases. Watching over all, police officers and public alike, are a proliferation of CCTV cameras, some of which are also linked to the databases. The officers are in turn supported by a range of sophisticated forensic and surveillance technology which would have seemed the stuff of science fiction in 1974. Out of sight, detectives still investigate, but they are supported by a range of other specialist investigators, many of whom are ‘civilian employees’. Bureaucracy governed the working life of the 1974 officer as it does those of 2009, but with a difference: in 1974 it was principally of the administrative variety, generated and controlled locally; by 2009 more is generated nationally, often associated with the criminal justice system, which has gone some way to restricting individual discretion. In 1974, law, convention, and administrative procedures, like Judges’ Rules, would have framed an officer’s working life; by 2009 much is dictated by statute law, secondary legislation, ‘doctrine’, ‘guidance’, or ‘practice advice’ emanating from the ‘centre’, whether that is in the form of the Home Office, NPIA, or ACPO. Behind the scenes national inspectorate bodies of a far greater reach than those of 1974 hunt for deviation from standard norms. The chief constables, who still have responsibility to direct and control the vast array of resources under their command, are themselves hedged in by rules, targets, and restrictions which their colleagues of earlier times would find hard to imagine.

Lifshitz theory of van der Waals (vdW) force and energy is strictly valid when the location at which the stress tensor is calculated is in vacuum. Generalization of Lifshitz theory to the case when the stress tensor is to be calculated in a dissipative material, as opposed to vacuum, is a surprisingly difficult undertaking because there is no expression for the electromagnetic stress tensor in dissipative materials. Here, we derive the expression for vdW force in planar dissipative media by calculating the Maxwell stress tensor in a fictious layer of vacuum, that is eventually made to vanish,