1211.3062 (Jeffrey Bub)

Bananaworld: Quantum Mechanics for Primates    [PDF]

Jeffrey Bub

This is intended to be a serious paper, in spite of the title. The idea is that quantum mechanics is about probabilistic correlations, i.e., about the structure of information, insofar as a theory of information is essentially a theory of probabilistic correlations. To make this clear, it suffices to consider measurements of two binary-valued observables, x with outcomes a = 0 or 1, performed by Alice in a region A, and y with outcomes b = 0 or 1 performed by Bob in a separated region B -- or, to emphasize the banality of the phenomena, two ways of peeling a banana, resulting in one of two tastes. The imagined bananas of Bananaworld are non-standard, with probabilistic correlations for peelings and tastes that lie outside the classical correlation polytope, which has the structure of a simplex. The 'no go' theorems tell us that we can't shoe-horn these correlations into the classical simplex by supposing that something has been left out of the story. The nonclassical features of quantum mechanics, including the irreducible information loss on measurement, are shown to be generic features of non-simplex theories. As far as the conceptual problems are concerned, we might as well talk about bananas.

View original: http://arxiv.org/abs/1211.3062