Notes on a Paulian Idea: Foundational, Historical, Anecdotal and Forward-Looking Thoughts on the Quantum

Abstract

This document is the first installment of three in the Cerro Grande Fire Series. It is a collection of letters written to various colleagues, most of whom regularly circuit this archive, including Howard Barnum, Paul Benioff, Charles Bennett, Herbert Bernstein, Doug Bilodeau, Gilles Brassard, Jeffrey Bub, Carlton Caves, Gregory Comer, Robert Griffiths, Adrian Kent, Rolf Landauer, Hideo Mabuchi, David Mermin, David Meyer, Michael Nielsen, Asher Peres, John Preskill, Mary Beth Ruskai, Ruediger Schack, Abner Shimony, William Wootters, Anton Zeilinger, and many others. The singular thread sewing all the letters together is the quantum. Some of the pieces are my best efforts to date to give substance to an evanescent thought I see rising from the field of quantum information---I call it the Paulian idea. To the extent I have communicated its misty shadow to my correspondents and seen a twinkle of enthusiasm, it seemed worthwhile to expand the jury on this anniversary occasion.

504 pages including introduction, table of contents, and index of names; no figures

References in corpus (10)

• Entanglement of Formation of an Arbitrary State of Two Qubits
• Measurement of conditional phase shifts for quantum logic
• Relational Quantum Mechanics
• Quantum Copying: Beyond the No-Cloning Theorem
• Hidden Variables and the Two Theorems of John Bell
• On the Improvement of Frequency Stardards with Quantum Entanglement
• Information Tradeoff Relations for Finite-Strength Quantum Measurements
• Nonorthogonal Quantum States Maximize Classical Information Capacity
• Information-theoretic characterization of quantum chaos
• Optimal Eavesdropping in Quantum Cryptography. I

Cited by in corpus (13)

• Quantum Mechanics as Quantum Information (and only a little more)
• Is the quantum state real? An extended review of $\psi$-ontology theorems
• Quantum Foundations in the Light of Quantum Information
• Quantum-Bayesian Coherence
• A Bayesian approach to compatibility, improvement, and pooling of quantum states
• Determinism, independence and objectivity are incompatible
• The Significance of Information in Quantum Theory
• Bohr's Conception of the Quantum Mechanical State of a System and Its Role in the Framework of Complementarity
• Neural Unpredictability, the Interpretation of Quantum Theory, and the Mind-Body Problem
• Quantum Bayesianism: A Study
• Quantum information processing and quantum logic: toward mutual illumination
• Copenhagen Computation: How I Learned to Stop Worrying and Love Bohr
• On a Supposed Conceptual Inadequacy of the Shannon Information in Quantum Mechanics