Author Archives: Mateus Araújo

I’m frequently told that probabilities are the limit of relative frequencies for an infinite number of repetitions. It sounds nice: it defines a difficult concept – probabilities – in terms of a simple one – frequencies – and even gives … Continue reading →

Recently two nice papers appeared on the arXiv, the most recent by Galley and Masanes, and the oldest by López Grande et al.. They are both – although a bit indirectly – about the age old question of the equivalence … Continue reading →

Everybody™ thinks that quantum teleportation is lame. Even science-loving xkcd thinks quantum teleportation is lame, and has a comic mocking it: This breaks my heart. I want to actually defend quantum teleportation, and show that Randall Munroe is wrong. Quantum … Continue reading →

To conclude the proof of Wallace’s version of the Deutsch-Wallace theorem, we shall add the Equivalence theorem from the previous post to a pretty weak decision theory, and show that if you are rational and live in a universe described … Continue reading →

One might still be worried about Deutsch’s Additivity. What if it is actually necessary prove the Born rule? In this case one wouldn’t be able to use the Born rule in the Many-Worlds interpretation without committing oneself to stupid decisions, … Continue reading →

With the decision theory from the previous post already giving us probabilities, all that is left to do is add the Many-Worlds interpretation and show that these probabilities must actually be given by the Born rule. Sounds easy, no? But … Continue reading →

There exists a problem in the world, that is even more pressing than the position of cheese in the cheeseburger emoji: namely that nobody™ understands the Deutsch-Wallace theorem. I’ve talked to a lot of people about it, and the usual … Continue reading →

Consider the entirely hypothetical situation where you are in a physics conference with really bad wifi. Either because the router has a hard limit in the amount of devices that can connect simultaneously, or the bandwidth is too small to … Continue reading →

Last week two curious papers appeared on the arXiv, one by Marletto and Vedral, and the other by Bose et al., proposing to test whether the gravitational field must be quantized. I think they have a nice idea there, that … Continue reading →

EDIT: Philip Ball has updated his article on Nature News, correcting the most serious of its errors. While everyone makes mistakes, few actually admit to them, so I think this action is rather praiseworthy. Correspondingly, I’m removing criticism of that … Continue reading →