In this paper, I try once again to cause some good-natured trouble. The issue remains, when will we ever stop burdening the taxpayer with conferences devoted to the quantum foundations? The suspicion is expressed that no end will be in sight until a means is found to reduce quantum theory to two or three statements of crisp physical (rather than abstract, axiomatic) significance. In this regard, no tool appears better calibrated for a direct assault than quantum information theory. Far from a strained application of the latest fad to a time-honored problem, this method holds promise precisely because a large part—but not all—of the structure of quantum theory has always concerned information. It is just that the physics community needs reminding. This paper, though takingquant-ph/0106166 as its core, corrects one mistake and offers several observations beyond the previous version. In particular, I identify one element of quantum mechanics that I would not label a subjective term in the theory—it is the integer parameter D traditionally ascribed to a quantum system via its Hilbert-space dimension. 1

The manner in which states of some quantum systems become effectively classical is of great significance for the foundations of quantum physics, as well as for problems of practical interest such as quantum engineering. In the past two decades it has become increasingly clear that many (perhaps all) of the symptoms of classicality can be induced in quantum systems by their environments. Thus decoherence is caused by the interaction in which the environment in effect monitors certain observables of the system, destroying coherence between the pointer states corresponding to their eigenvalues. This leads to environment-induced superselection or einselection, a quantum process associated with selective loss of information. Einselected pointer states are stable. They can retain correlations with the rest of the universe in spite of the environment. Einselection enforces classicality by imposing an effective ban on the vast majority of the Hilbert space, eliminating especially the flagrantly nonlocal ‘‘Schrödinger-cat states.’ ’ The classical structure of phase space emerges from the quantum Hilbert space in the appropriate macroscopic limit. Combination of einselection with dynamics leads to the idealizations of a point and of a classical trajectory. In measurements, einselection replaces quantum entanglement between the apparatus and the measured system with the classical correlation. Only the preferred pointer observable of the apparatus can store information

This paper is a commentary on the foundational significance of the Clifton-Bub-Halvorson theorem characterizing quantum theory in terms of three information-theoretic constraints. I argue that: (1) a quantum theory is best understood as a theory about the possibilities and impossibilities of information transfer, as opposed to a theory about the mechanics of nonclassical waves or particles, (2) given the information-theoretic constraints, any mechanical theory of quantum phenomena that includes an account of the measuring instruments that reveal these phenomena must be empirically equivalent to a quantum theory, and (3) assuming the information-theoretic constraints are in fact satisfied in our world, no mechanical theory of quantum phenomena that includes an account of measurement interactions can be acceptable, and the appropriate aim of physics at the fundamental level then becomes the representation and manipulation of information.

In this paper, I try to cause some good-natured trouble. The issue at stake is when will we ever stop burdening the taxpayer with conferences and workshops devoted— explicitly or implicitly—to the quantum foundations? The suspicion is expressed that no end will be in sight until a means is found to reduce quantum theory to two or three statements of crisp physical (rather than abstract, axiomatic) significance. In this regard, no tool appears to be better calibrated for a direct assault than quantum information theory. Far from being a strained application of the latest fad to a deepseated problem, this method holds promise precisely because a large part (but not all) of the structure of quantum theory has always concerned information. It is just that the physics community has somehow forgotten this.

We develop a systematic approach to quantum probability as a theory of rational bettingin quantum gambles. In these games of chance, the agent is betting in advance on the outcomes of several (finitely many) incompatible measurements. One of the measurements is subsequently chosen and performed and the money placed on the other measurements is returned to the agent. We show how the rules of rational betting imply all the interesting features of quantum probability, even in such finite gambles. These include the uncertainty principle and the violation of Bell’s inequality amongothers. Quantum gambles are closely related to quantum logic and provide a new semantics for it. We conclude with a philosophical discussion on the interpretation of quantum mechanics.

Recently, Brukner and Zeilinger (Phys. Rev. Lett. 83(17) (2001) 3354) have claimed that the Shannon information is not well defined as a measure of information in quantum mechanics, adducing arguments that seek to show that it is inextricably tied to classical notions of measurement. It is shown here that these arguments do not succeed: the Shannon information does not have problematic ties to classical concepts. In a further argument, Brukner and Zeilinger compare the Shannon information unfavourably to their preferred information measure, Ið~pÞ; with regard to the definition of a notion of ‘‘total information content.’ ’ This argument is found unconvincing and the relationship between individual measures of information and notions of ‘‘total information content’ ’ investigated. We close by considering the prospects of Zeilinger’s Foundational Principle as a foundational principle for quantum mechanics.

The aim of this paper is to relate algebraic quantum mechanics to topos theory, so as to construct new foundations for quantum logic and quantum spaces. Motivated by Bohr’s idea that the empirical content of quantum physics is accessible only through classical physics, we show how a noncommutative C*-algebra of observables A induces a topos T (A) in which the amalgamation of all of its commutative subalgebras comprises a single commutative C*-algebra A. According to the constructive Gelfand duality theorem of Banaschewski and Mulvey, the latter has an internal spectrum �(A) in T (A), which in our approach plays the role of the quantum phase space of the system. Thus we associate a locale (which is the topos-theoretical notion of a space and which intrinsically carries the intuitionistic logical structure of a Heyting algebra) to a C*-algebra (which is the noncommutative notion of a space). In this setting, states on A become probability measures (more precisely, valuations) on �, and self-adjoint elements of A define continuous functions (more precisely, locale maps) from � to Scott’s interval domain. Noting that open subsets of �(A) correspond to propositions about the system, the pairing map that assigns a (generalized) truth value to a state and a proposition assumes an extremely simple categorical form. Formulated in this way, the quantum theory defined by A is essentially turned into a classical theory, internal to the topos T (A). These results were inspired by the topos-theoretic approach to quantum physics proposed by Butterfield and Isham, as recently generalized by Döring and Isham.

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Modal interpretations have the ambition to construe quantum mechanics as an objective, man-independent description of physical reality. Their second leading idea is probabilism: quantum mechanics does not completely fix physical reality but yields probabilities. In working out these ideas an important motif is to stay close to the standard formalism of quantum mechanics and to refrain from introducing new structure by hand. In this paper we explain how this programme can be made concrete. In particular, we show that the Born probability rule, and sets of definite-valued observables to which the Born probabilities pertain, can be uniquely defined from the quantum state and Hilbert space structure. We discuss the status of probability in modal interpretations, and to this end we make a comparison with many-worlds alternatives. An overall point that we stress is that the modal ideas define a general framework and research programme rather than one definite and finished interpretation. Key words: interpretation of quantum mechanics; modal interpretation; probability; many worlds

I show how quantum mechanics, like the theory of relativity, can be understood as a 'principle theory' in Einstein's sense, and I use this notion to explore the approach to the problem of interpretation developed in my book