Monday, August 17, 2015

Be free little quanta!

In 2006, John Conway and Simon Kochen published a “free will theorem” that showed, subject to assumptions from special relativity and pure quantum theory, that if the actions of an observer are not determined by the events in her past, then the behavior of whatever she’s observing cannot be determined by the events in its past either. They are perfectly up-front about what this means: if anyone anywhere has free will, then so do elementary particles, or as Conway and Kochen put it, “fundamental particles are continually making their own decisions."

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