[PhilPhys] This week's Phil Physics seminar, Oxford: Bob Coecke

[Christopher Timpson]

Dear All,

This week Bob Coecke from the Comlab in Oxford will be talking at the Oxford 
philosophy of physics research seminar (4.30pm, Thursday, 10 Merton St).

His title is: "High Level Reasoning about the Low Level Scale"

Abstract:

We report on progress in an approach which aims to provide quantum theory with 
a purely diagrammatic calculus, a logical foundation, and increased degrees of 
axiomatic freedom, while still retaining full expressiveness. 
Key to this approach is the fact that monoidal categories provide a natural 
framework to reason about systems, processes and their interactions of any 
kind.  We provide two applications of this framework. 
An axiomatization of the notion of complementary observables exposes the flows 
of information in sophisticated quantum informatic protocols involving complex 
entanglements, and an axiomatization of relative phases provides new insights 
in the origin and peculiarity of quantum non-locality.

The applications are drawn from the following papers:
[1] Bob Coecke & Ross Duncan. "Interacting quantum observables". ICALP'08.
[2] Bob Coecke, Bill Edwards and Rob Spekkens. "The group-theoretic origin of 
non-locality".

Bob has recently completed a survey paper on this topic. If you'd like to see a 
copy before the talk, let me know and I will pass it on.

Hope to see some of you on Thursday,
Best wishes,
Chris
_______________________________________________
PhilPhys - Philosophy of Physics Mail Group
Help & Archives: http://phil.elte.hu/PhilPhys