Abstract
In this essay I develop quantum contextuality as a potential candidate for Wheeler’s universal regulating principle, arguing—contrary to Wheeler—that this ultimately implies that ‘bit’ comes from ‘it’.
All I did this week was rearrange bits on the internet. I had no real impact on the physical world.
— Dilbert
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Notes
- 1.
It is worth noting that in quantum theory the vacuum may be represented by a quantum state \(| vac \rangle \). This would seem to blur the distinction between ‘being’ and ‘nothingness,’ but we will leave that discussion for another time.
- 2.
We will not concern ourselves in this essay with the nature of momentum and energy.
- 3.
Quantum field theory has rendered the difference between particle and field virtually meaningless: a particle is the quantization of a field.
- 4.
The first use of the word ‘bit’ in the sense of a binary digit was in Claude Shannon’s seminal 1948 paper on information theory in which he ascribed the origin of the term to John Tukey who had written a memo on which the term ‘binary digit’ had been contracted to ‘bit’ [19].
- 5.
Famously, the T206 Honus Wagner card, distributed between 1909 and 1911, is the most expensive trading card in history, one having sold in 2007 for $2.8 million.
- 6.
Again, this notation is meant to formalize the notion that the only values that \(q\) may take are 0 and 1.
- 7.
The requirement of mutual exclusivity is used to distinguish a ‘bit’ from a ‘qubit’ where the latter allows for superpositions of 0 and 1.
- 8.
The notation \(\ll \) is standard but, given the more general audience of this essay, I have adopted \(\preceq \) so as to clearly distinguish it from the usual meaning of \(\ll \) in inequalities.
- 9.
We point those readers interested in a refresher on measurements and bases in quantum mechanics to Ref. [18].
- 10.
If you ever do, run like hell. The zombies are coming.
- 11.
This is non-standard notation that I introduce here for the sake of simplifying the presentation.
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Durham, I.T. (2015). Contextuality: Wheeler’s Universal Regulating Principle. In: Aguirre, A., Foster, B., Merali, Z. (eds) It From Bit or Bit From It?. The Frontiers Collection. Springer, Cham. https://doi.org/10.1007/978-3-319-12946-4_18
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