cousin girls » free will http://cousingirls.com are we there yet? Sat, 29 May 2010 14:35:37 +0000 en hourly 1 http://wordpress.org/?v=3.0.1 Conway/Kochen: The Free Will Theorem http://cousingirls.com/conwaykochen-the-free-will-theorem http://cousingirls.com/conwaykochen-the-free-will-theorem#comments Mon, 01 Mar 2010 03:23:17 +0000 morton http://cousingirls.com/?p=149 John Conway together with Simon Kochen in 2006 put forward and proved a theorem that (very) roughly says this: “If human beings have free will, then elementary particles have free will.”

Abstract:
On the basis of three physical axioms, we prove that if the choice of a particular type of spin 1 experiment is not a function of the information accessible to the experimenters, then its outcome is equally not a function of the information accessible to the particles. We show that this result is robust, and deduce that neither hidden variable theories nor mechanisms of the GRW type for wave function collapse can be made relativistic. We also establish the consistency of our axioms and discuss the philosophical implications.

http://arxiv.org/abs/quant-ph/0604079

On that topic, Conway held six instructive and entertaining lectures at Princeton:

http://paw.princeton.edu/issues/2009/07/15/pages/6596/index.xml

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