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Is information the key?

Nature Physics volume 1, pages 2–4 (2005)Cite this article

Quantum information science has brought us novel means of calculation and communication. But could its theorems hold the key to understanding the quantum world at its most profound level? Do the truly fundamental laws of nature concern — not waves and particles — but information?

This year marks the centenary of quantum mechanics. Despite earlier work by Max Planck, it was Albert Einstein's Nobel prize-winning 1905 paper1 on the photoelectric effect that gave us what is arguably the greatest scientific theory of all time. Subsequently, the stones that make up the exquisite structure of quantum mechanics were laid out, one by one, by a stream of legendary giants such as Niels Bohr, Erwin Schrödinger and Werner Heisenberg — sometimes to the horror of Einstein. An almost inevitable consequence of this collective foundational effort over so many years is that quantum mechanics, for all its elegance, is built upon a rather disjointed, ad hoc set of axioms.

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Figure 1: Assign classical bits 0 and 1 to, for example, the ground and excited states of an atom, and the power of quantum computation is unleashed.

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  1. the Département d'informatique et de recherche opérationnelle, Université de Montréal, Québec, H3C 3J7, Canada

    Gilles Brassard

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  1. Gilles Brassard
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Brassard, G. Is information the key?. Nature Phys 1, 2–4 (2005). https://doi.org/10.1038/nphys134

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