History and Foundations of Physics
Jeroen van Dongen (Universiteit Utrecht)
Einstein, Rupp, and the canal ray experiments on the nature of light: facts, fraud and bias
In 1926, Albert Einstein proposed two experiments that were to probe the wave versus particle aspects of light. Emil Rupp, a young experimentalist from Heidelberg, conducted Einstein's experiments, but his results were soon surrounded by controversy, as fellow experimenters claimed their utter implausibility. Nevertheless, the "Einstein-Rupp experiments" quickly made their way into the quantum mechanical literature, only to disappear again after 1935. That year, Rupp retracted five publications, under mounting charges of fraud. We will reconstruct in detail the Einstein-Rupp collaboration, and see if also Rupp's work from 1926 was indeed fraudulent.
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Jean Bricmont (Université Louvain-la-Neuve)
Why does nonlocality support Bohm's theory?
In 1952 Bohm showed how all the results of (nonrelativistic) quantum mechanics could be obtained within a deterministic theory in which no measurement problem arises. However, that theory was nonlocal, i.e. included actions at a distance that are extremely counterintuitive and pose problems from the point of view of relativity. But in 1964 John Bell showed that any theory that reproduces the quantum mechanical predictions must be nonlocal in precisely the sense in which Bohm's theory is nonlocal. Therefore, Bell's result, although it is rarely presented in that way, strengthens Bohm's theory.
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Michiel Seevinck (Universiteit Utrecht)
On the happy marriage of quantum foundations and information theory
During the last two decades we have witnessed a marriage of research in the foundations of quantum and information theory. This marriage has turned out to be a happy one, and even has produced a large offspring. Indeed, even if it has not been widely acknowledged, there has been great progress in exploring questions that once were considered to be interesting only for the philosophically inclined. This has first of all been the result of a better understanding of quantum entanglement and its possible usage in quantum information theoretic settings. I will present an overview of the developments and highlight a few fundamental results. These include:
- no-signalling and non-local correlations as a resource for performing information theoretic tasks;
- monogamy of non-local correlations as the principle behind the security of quantum cryptography;
- novel understanding of what violations of the so-called Bell-inequality tell us;
- going beyond Heisenberg's uncertainty principle: i.e., independent of the structure of quantum theory it is the case that no theory can exist that is both no-signalling and allowing perfect predictability of measurement outcomes.
