Philosophy of Physics Seminar (Thursday - Week 2, TT23)
Thursday 4 May, 4:30pm
Lecture Room, Radcliffe Humanities
Johannes Fankhauser (Oxford/Innsbruck): 'Quantum Uncertainty and Empirical Completeness'
I formally define and address the question whether quantum uncertainty could be fundamental, or whether post-quantum theories could have predictive advantage whilst conforming to the Born rule on average. This notion of what I call `empirical completeness' refers to actual prediction making beyond the Born probabilities, and thus the framework delineates this operational notion of predictability from the`hidden variable' programme in quantum theory. I study how empirical completeness is connected to signal-locality, and argue that, based on existing results, a partial proof for the impossibility of predictive advantage can be established for bi-partite quantum systems. The relevant results demonstrate signal-locality as a sufficient principle that might explain the fundamental chanciness in present and future quantum theories. This in turn reconciles us to many quantum features as aspects of limits on Nature's predictability. I then propose an extended Wigner's friend experiment combining these ideas.
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