Rolf Landauer never thought his principle would solve the mysteries of quantum mechanics. He did expect, though, that information would play a part in making sense of quantum weirdness.
And sure, nobody thinks that all the mysteries surrounding quantum mechanics are solved now — and many wonder whether they ever will be, for that matter. But a new approach to one deep quantum mystery suggests that viewing the world in terms of information, and applying Landauer's principle to it, does answer one question that many people believed to be unanswerable.
That question, posed in many forms, boils down to whether quantum math describes something inherent and real about the physical world. Some experts say yes; others believe quantum math is just about what people can find out about the word. Another way of posing the question is to ask whether the quantum description of nature is “ontic” or “epistemic” — about reality, or about knowledge of reality. Most attempts to articulate an interpretation of what quantum math really means (and there are lots of such interpretations) tend to favor either an ontic or epistemic point of view. But even some epistemic interpretations maintain that outcomes of a measurement are determined by some intrinsic property of the system being measured. Those are sometimes lumped with the ontic group as “Type I” interpretations. Some other interpretations (classified as Type II) believe quantum measurements deal with an observer’s knowledge or belief about an underlying reality, not some inherently fixed property.
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