International Meet on Quantum Correlations and Logic, Language and Set Theory 2013
The past few years have witnessed a rapid upsurge of interest in quantum information science and its applications. Because of the field's inherently interdisciplinary nature, many researchers in it today come from other areas of theoretical and experimental physics, like condensed matter physics, quantum optics, high energy physics, and even astrophysics and mathematics. While the field has developed in the past 20 years into its own, one of its greatest attractiveness is that it has provided a simple and clear language and a new perspective to old issues in the different disciplines. It has enabled looking at physics from an information and computation perspective. This has raised the potential of a new quantum revolution in information science and technology. However, a number of deep-rooted mysteries and paradoxes remain to be accounted for in the fundamentals of this field, with some of them even touching upon the foundations of modern science.
With this perspective, the international meeting will focus on the interrelation between the fields of quantum information theory, quantum computation and the foundations of quantum mechanics, with particular stress on applying insights derived from these fields to foundational and fundamental questions in interdisciplinary areas of wider interest. Potential such areas of application include the possible connection of entanglement and open system dynamics with black hole thermodynamics, the possible relation of computational complexity to the quantum measurement problem, the role of identity and individuation in quantum mechanics, and quantum cognition. A significant portion of this international meeting keeping up the spirit of the past Nalanda Dialogs (2005-2013), is also intended to address different aspects of quantum information theory within a wider context of interplay between Language, Logic and Reality in relation with the concept of Individuation and Identity – the way these concepts figure in our formal linguistic artifacts as a whole. Thus, this meet would bring together researchers in the fields of quantum information theory, quantum computation and the foundations of quantum mechanics, along with philosophers of science working on different aspects of the Individuation and Identity issue.
The meeting is divided into two parts - the first three days are kept for seminars on issues pertaining to Quantum information theory and its applications as well as different aspects of foundations of quantum mechanics, and the remaining three days will be devoted to a school related to issues of Quantum Logic and Set theory addressing the conundrum of Individuation and Identity. A special session on the response of philosophers from various schools including Buddhist logicians on vexatious interpretational issues is planned to be held towards the end.
The areas to be covered in the first three days of the seminars are:
1. Quantum information theory: entanglement, cryptography, open system effects, communication, relativistic quantum information.
2. Foundations of quantum mechanics: Nonlocality, contextuality, quantum and post-quantum correlations.
Areas to be covered within the three days school are:
Quantum Language, Logic and Set Theory: How the issue of Identity and Individuation figure in quantum logic beyond von Neumann, e.g., Para consistent logic, Schrodinger Logic, Question of developing mathematical framework to provide a formal semantics of non-standard logics.