LAUSR.org creates dashboard-style pages of related content for over 1.5 million academic articles. Sign Up to like articles & get recommendations!

Redundancy of einselected information in quantum Darwinism: The irrelevance of irrelevant environment bits

Photo by freegraphictoday from unsplash

The objective, classical world emerges from the underlying quantum substrate via the proliferation of redundant copies of selected information into the environment, which acts as a communication channel, transmitting that… Click to show full abstract

The objective, classical world emerges from the underlying quantum substrate via the proliferation of redundant copies of selected information into the environment, which acts as a communication channel, transmitting that information to observers. These copies are independently accessible, allowing many observers to reach consensus about the state of a quantum system via its imprints in the environment. Quantum Darwinism recognizes that the redundancy of information is thus central to the emergence of objective reality in the quantum world. However, in addition to the ``quantum system of interest,'' there are many other systems ``of no interest'' in the Universe that can imprint information on the common environment. There is therefore a danger that the information of interest will be diluted with irrelevant bits, suppressing the redundancy responsible for objectivity. We show that mixing of the relevant (the ``wheat'') and irrelevant (the ``chaff'') bits of information makes little quantitative difference to the redundancy of the information of interest. Thus, we demonstrate that it does not matter whether one separates the wheat (relevant information) from the (irrelevant) chaff: The large redundancy of the relevant information survives dilution, providing evidence of the objective, effectively classical world.

Keywords: quantum; information; quantum darwinism; redundancy; environment

Journal Title: Physical Review A
Year Published: 2017

Link to full text (if available)


Share on Social Media:                               Sign Up to like & get
recommendations!

Related content

More Information              News              Social Media              Video              Recommended



                Click one of the above tabs to view related content.