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Friday, November 18, 2011

The quantum state cannot be interpreted statistically

"On a related, but more abstract note, the quantum state has the striking property of being an exponentially complicated object. Specifically, the number of real parameters needed to specify a quantum state is exponential in the number of systems n. This has a consequence for classical simulation of quantum systems. If a simulation is constrained by our assumptions - that is, if it must store in memory a state for a quantum system, with independent preparations assigned uncorrelated states - then it will need an amount of memory which is exponential in the number of quantum systems.


For these reasons and others, many will continue to hold that the quantum state is not a real object. We have shown that this is only possible if one or more of the assumptions above is dropped. More radical approaches [14] are careful to avoid associating quantum systems with any physical properties at all. The alternative is to seek physically well motivated reasons why the other two assumptions might fail."

arXiv

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