What is Quantum Information?

OLIMPIA LOMBARDI; SEBASTIAN FORTIN; FEDERICO HOLIK; CRISTIAN LÓPEZ

Cambridge University Press

Lugar: Cambridge; Año: 2017 p. 264

978-1-107-14211-4

By analogy with the Industrial Revolution, at present many people talk about an Information Revolution that began in the mid-twentieth century and continues to this day. Although triggered by the advent of digital technologies and established by the proliferation of digital computers, the drastic changes rapidly exceeded the limits of technology to pervade all aspects of social life. Nowadays, information shapes all our everyday activities and thoughts. Given this situation, it is not surprising that, during the past decades, philosophy has begun to focus its attention on the search of an elucidation of the notion of information. The many dimensions of information make this task particularly interesting from a philosophical viewpoint, but, at the same time, attempt against a unified answer to the problem. At present, different interpretations of the notion of information coexist, sometimes as the consequence of implicitly conflating its different meanings, but in many cases also as the result of the multiple facets of the concept. At the same time, new interpretive problems have arisen with the advent of the research field called ?quantum information theory.? Those problems combine the difficultiesintheunderstandingoftheconceptofinformationwiththewell-known foundational puzzles derived from quantum mechanics itself. Of course, interpretive issues were not an obstacle to the huge development of quantum information theory as a scientific area of research, where new formal results multiply rapidly. Nevertheless, the question ?What is quantum information?? is still far from having an answer on which the whole quantum information community agrees. It is in this context that the question about the nature of quantum information deserves to be considered from a conceptual viewpoint. The aim of this volume is, precisely, to address the issue from several and varied perspectives, which makes manifest its different aspects and its many implications. With this purpose, the chapters of this volume are organized in three parts. Part I, ?The Concept of Information,? groups the chapters mainly devoted to inquiring into the concept itself and its relationships with other notions, such as knowledge, representation, and manipulation. In Part II, ?Information and Quantum Mechanics,? the links between informational and quantum issues enter the stage. Finally, Part III, ?Probability, Correlations, and Information,? addresses the subject matter by considering how the notions of probability and correlation underlie the concept of information in different problem domains.