Since 2002 Perimeter Institute has been recording seminars, conference talks, and public outreach events using video cameras installed in our lecture theatres. Perimeter now has 7 formal presentation spaces for its many scientific conferences, seminars, workshops and educational outreach activities, all with advanced audio-visual technical capabilities. Recordings of events in these areas are all available On-Demand from this Video Library and on Perimeter Institute Recorded Seminar Archive (PIRSA).
PIRSA is a permanent, free, searchable, and citable archive of recorded seminars from relevant bodies in physics. This resource has been partially modelled after Cornell University's arXiv.org.
If one is worried by the quantum measurement problem,a natural question to ask is: Does the quantum-mechanical description of the world retain its validity when its application leads to superpositions of states which by some reasonable criterion are _macroscopically distinct_? Or rather, does any such superposition automatically get "collapsed", even in the absence of "measurement" by a human observer, into one or other of its branches? Scenarios which predict the latter (for example the GRWP theory) may be denoted generically by the term "macrorealistic".
The way we combine operators in quantum theory depends on the causal relationship involved. For spacelike separated spacetime regions we use the tensor product. For immediately sequential regions of spacetime we use the direct product. In the latter case we lose information that is we cannot go from the direct product of two operators to the two original operators. This is a kind of compression. We will see that such compression is associated with causal adjacency.
Once again the problem of indistinguishability has been recently tackled. The question is why indistinguishability, in quantum mechanics but not in classical one, forces a changes in statistics. Or, what is able to explain the difference between classical and quantum statistics? The answer given regards the structure of their state
Taking for granted that the mathematical apparatus for describing probabilities in quantum mechanics is well-understood via work of von Neumann, Lüders, Mackey, and Gleason, we present an overview of different interpretations of probability in quantum mechanics bearing on physics and experiment, with the aim of clarifying the meaning and place of so-called objective interpretations of quantum probability.
It is often suggested that the special theory of relativity is incompatible with any notion of the passage of time. I shall try to show, following in the footsteps of Abner Shimony, that there is transience to be found in Minkowski spacetime, but this transience is local rather than global.
After having been a Whiteheadian for decades, Abner, under the influence of Lovejoys book, "The Revolt against Dualism, no longer accepts Whiteheads philosophy. In this paper I try to challenge this change of heart, as well as suggest a modification of Whiteheads philosophy that allows for an elegant interpretation of
the EPR/Bell correlations.
Abner Shimony mentions that his undergraduate years at Yale in the forties provided an introduction to three profound philosophers that influenced his thought Alfred North Whitehead, Charles Sanders Peirce and Kurt Gödel. For all three, mathematics played a central role in the unfolding of their lives and thought. This paper will focus on the earliest of this trio, and focus on Peirces complex and rich views on the nature and practice of mathematics, attending first to the necessary and foundational nature Peirce ascribes to mathematics and to the place of hypothesis, diagrams,
In the context of Bell-type experiments, two related notions of "separability" are offered, one of which is logically stronger than the other. It is shown that the weaker of these is logically equivalent to the statistical independence condition widely taken to have been refuted by the results of experiments testing the Bell inequalities. Some consequences of the analysis are discussed.
I will show Abner how to construct Minkowski's space-time diagrams directly from Einstein's two postulates and some very elementary plane geometry. This geometric route into special relativity was developed while teaching the subject to nonscientists, but some of its features may be unfamiliar to physicists and philosophers.