The quantum formalism is a "measurement" formalism--a phenomenological formalism describing certain macroscopic regularities. We argue that it can be regarded, and best be understood, as arising from Bohmian mechanics, which is what emerges from Schr6dinger's equation for a system of particles when we merely insist that "particles " means particles. While distinctly non-Newtonian, Bohmian mechanics is a fully deterministic theory of particles in motion, a motion choreographed by the wave function. We find that a Bohmian universe, though deterministic, evolves in such a manner that an appearance of randomness emerges, precisely as described by the quantum formalism and given, for example, by "p = IV [ 2.,, A crucial ingredient in our analysis of the origin of this randomness is the notion of the effective wave function of a subsystem, a notion of interest in its own right and of relevance to any discussion of quantum theory. When the quantum formalism is regarded as arising in this way, the paradoxes and perplexities so often associated with (nonrelativistic) quantum theory simply evaporate.

Quantum cryptography could well be the first application of quantum mechanics at the individual quanta level. The very fast progress in both theory and experiments over the recent years are reviewed, with emphasis on open questions and technological issues. Contents I

Only finite precision measurements are experimentally reasonable, and they cannot distinguish a dense subset from its closure. We show that the rational vectors, which are dense in S 2, can be colored so that the contradiction with hidden variable theories provided by Kochen-Specker constructions does not obtain. Thus, in contrast to violation of the Bell inequalities, no quantum-over-classical advantage for information processing can be derived from the Kochen-Specker theorem alone.

No physical measurement can be performed with infinite precision. This leaves a loophole in the standard no-go arguments against non-contextual hidden variables. All such arguments rely on choosing special sets of quantum-mechanical observables with measurement outcomes that cannot be simulated non-contextually. As a consequence, these arguments do not exclude the hypothesis that the class of physical measurements in fact corresponds to a dense subset of all theoretically possible measurements with outcomes and quantum probabilities that can be recovered from a noncontextual hidden variable model. We show here by explicit construction that there are indeed such non-contextual hidden variable models, both for projection valued and positive operator valued measurements.

Bohmian mechanics is the most naively obvious embedding imaginable of Schrödinger’s equation into a completely coherent physical theory. It describes a world in which particles move in a highly non-Newtonian sort of way, one which may at first appear to have little to do with the spectrum of predictions of quantum mechanics. It turns out, however, that as a consequence of the defining dynamical equations of Bohmian mechanics, when a system has wave function ψ its configuration is typically random, with probability density ρ given by |ψ | 2, the quantum equilibrium distribution. It also turns out that the entire quantum formalism, operators as observables and all the rest, naturally emerges in Bohmian mechanics from the analysis of “measurements. ” This analysis reveals the status of operators as observables in the description of quantum phenomena, and facilitates a clear view of the range of applicability of the usual quantum mechanical formulas. Dedicated to Elliott Lieb on the occasion of his 70th birthday. Elliott will be (we fear unpleasantly) surprised to learn that he bears a greater responsibility for this paper than he could possibly imagine. We would of course like to think that our work addresses in some way the concern suggested by the title of his recent talks, The

The probability distribution P from which the history of our universe is sampled represents a theory of everything or TOE. We assume P is formally describable. Since most (uncountably many) distributions are not, this imposes a strong inductive bias. We show that P(x) is small for any universe x lacking a short description, and study the spectrum of TOEs spanned by two Ps, one reflecting the most compact constructive descriptions, the other the fastest way of computing everything. The former derives from generalizations of traditional computability, Solomonoff’s algorithmic probability, Kolmogorov complexity, and objects more random than Chaitin’s Omega, the latter from Levin’s universal search and a natural resource-oriented postulate: the cumulative prior probability of all x incomputable within time t by this optimal algorithm should be 1/t. Between both Ps we find a universal cumulatively enumerable measure that dominates traditional enumerable measures; any such CEM must assign low probability to any universe lacking a short enumerating program. We derive P-specific consequences for evolving observers, inductive reasoning, quantum physics, philosophy, and the expected duration of our universe.

Quantum information processing is at the crossroads of physics, mathematics and computer science. It is concerned with that we can and cannot do with quantum information that goes beyond the abilities of classical information processing devices. Communication complexity is an area of classical computer science that aims at quantifying the amount of communication necessary to solve distributed computational problems. Quantum communication complexity uses quantum mechanics to reduce the amount of communication that would be classically required. Pseudo-telepathy is a surprising application of quantum information processing to communication complexity. Thanks to entanglement, perhaps the most nonclassical manifestation of quantum mechanics, two or more quantum players can accomplish a distributed task with no need for communication whatsoever, which would be an impossible feat for classical players. After a detailed overview of the principle and purpose of pseudo-telepathy, we present a survey of recent and no-so-recent work on the subject. In particular, we describe and analyse all the pseudo-telepathy games currently known to the authors.

This article presents a general discussion of several aspects of our present understanding of quantum mechanics. The emphasis is put on the very special correlations that this theory makes possible: they are forbidden by very general arguments based on realism and local causality. In fact, these correlations are completely impossible in any circumstance, except the very special situations designed by physicists especially to observe these purely quantum effects. Another general point that is emphasized is the necessity for the theory to predict the emergence of a single result in a single realization of an experiment. For this purpose, orthodox quantum mechanics introduces a special postulate: the reduction of the state vector, which comes in addition to the Schrödinger evolution postulate. Nevertheless, the presence in parallel of two evolution processes of the same object (the state vector) may be a potential source for conflicts; various attitudes that are possible

We establish a link between symplectic topology and a recently emerged branch of functional analysis called the theory of quasi-states and quasi-measures (also known as topological measures). In the symplectic context quasi-states can be viewed as an algebraic way of packaging certain information contained in Floer theory, and in particular in spectral invariants of Hamiltonian diffeomorphisms introduced recently by Yong-Geun Oh. As a consequence we prove a number of new results on rigidity of intersections in symplectic manifolds. This work is a part of a joint project with Paul Biran.

Bohmian mechanics and the Ghirardi–Rimini–Weber theory provide opposite resolutions of the quantum measurement problem: the former postulates additional variables (the particle positions) besides the wave function, whereas the latter implements spontaneous collapses of the wave function by a nonlinear and stochastic modification of Schrödinger’s equation. Still, both theories, when understood appropriately, share the following structure: They are ultimately not about wave functions but about “matter” moving in space, represented by either particle trajectories, fields on space-time, or a discrete set of space-time points. The role of the wave function then is to govern the motion of the matter.