Branching Space-Times

This book develops a rigorous theory of indeterminism as a local and modal concept. Its crucial insight is that our world contains events or processes with alternative, really possible outcomes. The theory aims at clarifying what this assumption involves, and it does it in two ways. First, it provides a mathematically rigorous framework for local and modal indeterminism. Second, we support that theory by spelling out the philosophically relevant consequences of this formulation and by showing its fruitful applications in metaphysics. To this end, we offer a formal analysis of modal correlations and of causation, which is applicable in indeterministic and non-local contexts as well. We also propose a rigorous theory of objective single-case probabilities, intended to represent degrees of possibility. In a third step, we link our theory to current physics, investigating how local and modal indeterminism relates to issues in the foundations of physics, in particular, quantum non-locality and spatio-temporal relativity. The book also ventures into the philosophy of time, showing how the theory’s resources can be used to explicate the dynamic concept of the past, present, and future based on local indeterminism.

Contextual Inferences, Nonlocality, and the Incompleteness of Quantum Mechanics

It is known that “quantum non locality”, leading to the violation of Bell’s inequality and more generally of classical local realism, can be attributed to the conjunction of two properties, which we call here elementary locality and predictive completeness. Taking this point of view, we show again that quantum mechanics violates predictive completeness, allowing the making of contextual inferences, which can, in turn, explain why quantum non locality does not contradict relativistic causality. An important question remains: if the usual quantum state ψ is predictively incomplete, how do we complete it? We give here a set of new arguments to show that ψ should be completed indeed, not by looking for any “hidden variables”, but rather by specifying the measurement context, which is required to define actual probabilities over a set of mutually exclusive physical events.

Quantum Correlations and Quantum Non-Locality: A Review and a Few New Ideas

In this paper we make an extensive description of quantum non-locality, one of the most intriguing and fascinating facets of quantum mechanics. After a general presentation of several studies on this subject dealing with different but connected facets of quantum non-locality, we consider if this, and the friction it carries with special relativity, can eventually find a “solution” by considering higher dimensional spaces.

Discrimination of Non-Local Correlations

In view of the importance of quantum non-locality in cryptography, quantum computation, and communication complexity, it is crucial to decide whether a given correlation exhibits non-locality or not. As proved by Pitowski, this problem is NP-complete, and is thus computationally intractable unless NP is equal to P. In this paper, we first prove that the Euclidean distance of given correlations from the local polytope can be computed in polynomial time with arbitrary fixed error, granted the access to a certain oracle; namely, given a fixed error, we derive two upper bounds on the running time. The first bound is linear in the number of measurements. The second bound scales with the number of measurements to the sixth power. The former holds only for a very high number of measurements, and is never observed in the performed numerical tests. We, then, introduce a simple algorithm for simulating the oracle. In all of the considered numerical tests, the simulation of the oracle contributes with a multiplicative factor to the overall running time and, thus, does not affect the sixth-power law of the oracle-assisted algorithm.

Quantum Rayleigh Annihilation of Entangled Photons

The interpretation of published experimental results intended to prove the existence of a quantum phenomenon of non-locality involving photonic entangled states did not take into consideration the existence of the quantum Rayleigh conversion of photons in dielectric media. This phenomenon leads to the existence of high levels of correlations between two independent photonic and linearly polarized quantum states generated after the entangled photons have been absorbed through the quantum Rayleigh conversion. Both pure and mixed individual states of polarization result in expressions normally associated with entangled photonic states, providing support for the view that the physical reality of quantum non-locality is highly questionable.

Quantum Correlations and Permutation Symmetries

In this paper, the connections between quantum non-locality and permutation symmetries areexplored. This includes two types of symmetries: permutation across a superposition and permutationof qubits in a quantum system. An algorithm is proposed for nding the separability class ofa quantum state using a method based on factorizing an arbitrary multipartite state into possiblepartitions, cyclically permuting qubits of the vectors in a superposition to check which separabilityclass it falls into and thereafter using a reduced density-matrix analysis of the system is proposed.For the case of mixed quantum states, conditions for separability are found in terms of the partialtransposition of the density matrices of the quantum system. One of these conditions turns out tobe the Partial Positive Transpose (PPT) condition. A graphical method for analyzing separabilityis also proposed. The concept of permutation of qubits is shown to be useful in dening a newentanglement measure in the `engle'.

Quantum Rayleigh Annihilation of Entangled Photons

The interpretation of published experimental results intended to prove the existence of a quantum phenomenon of non-locality involving photonic entangled states did not take into consideration the existence of the quantum Rayleigh conversion of photons in dielectric media. This phenomenon leads to the existence of high levels of correlations between two independent photonic and linearly polarized quantum states generated after the entangled photons have been absorbed through the quantum Rayleigh conversion. Both pure and mixed individual states of polarization result in expressions normally associated with entangled photonic states, providing support for the view that the physical reality of quantum non-locality is highly questionable.