On October 22, 1934, in a famous experiment, Enrico Fermi and his colleagues discovered that a significant increase in induced radioactivity can be obtained when neutrons are slowed down by means of hydrogen atoms. This discovery and its explanation earned him the 1938 Nobel Prize in Physics. One year later, on October 1935, Fermi held a public speech in Palermo, Italy, presenting his findings at the 24th congress of the Italian Society for the Progress of Sciences. The transcription of his s...| arXiv.org
The Wigner's Friend thought experiment stands as one of the most intellectually provocative and challenging conceptual puzzles in quantum mechanics. It compels us to confront profound questions concerning the fundamental nature of reality, the very act of observation, and the possible role that consciousness might play within the quantum measurement process. This article gives a general presentation, beginning with Eugene Wigner's seminal proposal of the original thought experiment. In this p...| arXiv.org
I dispute the conventional claim that the second law of thermodynamics is saved from a "Maxwell's Demon" by the entropy cost of information erasure, and show that instead it is measurement that incurs the entropy cost. Thus Brillouin, who identified measurement as savior of the second law, was essentially correct, and putative refutations of his view, such as Bennett's claim to measure without entropy cost, are seen to fail when the applicable physics is taken into account. I argue that the t...| arXiv.org