Introduction to what these words mean in relationship to contemporary Quantum Information purpose and practice
General information about the collective Quantum entanglement experiments in relationship to Quantum Information
Quotes:
“…The primary cultural benefits of the experiments conducted by:
John Clauser, Alain Aspect, and Anton Zeilinger stem from their profound impact on philosophy and human understanding of reality, as well as their role in inspiring a new era of technology that is now permeating society...”
“…They also:
Deepen Human Understanding of the Cosmos: By confirming the predictions of quantum mechanics, the experiments enriched our comprehension of the fundamental principles that govern the universe at its most basic level, offering new metaphors for interconnectedness that transcend cultural boundaries and have been explored in relation to spiritual and social theories.
Provide the foundation for Quantum Information Science: The experiments legitimised the study and exploitation of entanglement, which was once considered a niche topic, and helped establish the field of quantum information science as a mainstream area of research and investment.
Enabled New Technologies: The experimental techniques developed by the laureates are foundational to the ongoing “second quantum revolution,” which is driving advancements in various applications with significant societal implications:
Created the foundation stones of Quantum Computing: The development of powerful computers that could solve problems far beyond the reach of classical computers.
Challenge the Nature of Reality and Causality: The experiments provided definitive proof that the universe is “weird” and does not operate according to “local realism”. This forced a major re-evaluation of fundamental philosophical concepts of reality, non-locality, and causality, blurring the lines between philosophy and physics.
They confirm that the universe is fundamentally quantum mechanical. This means that it cannot be described by classical physics. They have laid the foundation for modern quantum information science.
They provide the experimental proof of the violation of Bell inequalities, confirming the predictions of quantum mechanics and showing that the universe is not governed by “local hidden variables”. Their work essentially proved that the phenomenon of quantum entanglement is real, a finding for which they were awarded the 2022 Nobel Prize in Physics.
The collective results of these experiments have decisively shown that nature behaves as predicted by quantum mechanics, the particles are truly “grey” (undetermined state) until measured, and there are no local hidden variables…”
SOURCE for the above
A more descriptive and technical add on to this message.
Quantum Information
Quote:
“…Quantum information is the information of the state of a quantum system. It is the basic entity of study in quantum information science,[1][2][3] and can be manipulated using quantum information processing techniques. Quantum information refers to both the technical definition in terms of Von Neumann entropy and the general computational term.
It is an interdisciplinary field that involves quantum mechanics, computer science, information theory, philosophy and cryptography among other fields.[4][5][6] Its study is also relevant to disciplines such as cognitive science, psychology and neuroscience.[7][8][9][10] Its main focus is in extracting information from matter at the microscopic scale. Observation in science is one of the most important ways of acquiring information and measurement is required in order to quantify the observation, making this crucial to the scientific method. In quantum mechanics, due to the uncertainty principle, non-commuting observables cannot be precisely measured simultaneously, as an eigenstate in one basis is not an eigenstate in the other basis. According to the eigenstate–eigenvalue link, an observable is well-defined (definite) when the state of the system is an eigenstate of the observable.[11] Since any two non-commuting observables are not simultaneously well-defined, a quantum state can never contain definitive information about both non-commuting observables.[8]
Data can be encoded into the quantum state of a quantum system as quantum information.[12] While quantum mechanics deals with examining properties of matter at the microscopic level,[13][8] quantum information science focuses on extracting information from those properties,[8] and quantum computation manipulates and processes information – performs logical operations – using quantum information processing techniques.[14]
Quantum information, like classical information, can be processed using digital computers, transmitted from one location to another, manipulated with algorithms, and analyzed with computer science and mathematics. Just like the basic unit of classical information is the bit, quantum information deals with qubits.[15] Quantum information can be measured using Von Neumann entropy…”
“…Relation to quantum mechanics
Quantum mechanics is the study of how microscopic physical systems change dynamically in nature. In the field of quantum information theory, the quantum systems studied are abstracted away from any real world counterpart. A qubit might for instance physically be a photon in a linear optical quantum computer, an ion in a trapped ion quantum computer, or it might be a large collection of atoms as in a superconducting quantum computer. Regardless of the physical implementation, the limits and features of qubits implied by quantum information theory hold as all these systems are mathematically described by the same apparatus of density matrices over the complex numbers. Another important difference with quantum mechanics is that while quantum mechanics often studies infinite-dimensional systems such as a harmonic oscillator, quantum information theory is concerned with both continuous-variable systems[34] and finite-dimensional systems.[8][35][36]…”
Source for this section: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Quantum_information
Additional references:
Nature Magazine reference https://www.nature.com/articles/s41566-022-01122-8
BBC video link https://www.bbc.com/news/science-environment-63121287
I emboldened and italicized some of the text herein.