The probabilistic world

TL;DR

This paper explores the foundational role of probabilities in physics, demonstrating how quantum formalism can be derived from classical statistical concepts and showing that probabilistic cellular automata can be viewed as quantum systems.

Contribution

It introduces a framework connecting classical statistics with quantum formalism, including the representation of automata as quantum systems with Hamiltonian dynamics.

Findings

Quantum formalism emerges from classical probabilistic systems.

Probabilistic cellular automata can be formulated as quantum systems.

Bell's inequalities are not universally applicable to subsystems.

Abstract

Physics is based on probabilities as fundamental entities of a mathematical description. Expectation values of observables are computed according to the classical statistical rule. The overall probability distribution for one world covers all times. The quantum formalism arises once one focuses on the evolution of the time-local probabilistic information. Wave functions or the density matrix allow the formulation of a general linear evolution law for classical statistics. The quantum formalism for classical statistics is a powerful tool which allows us to implement for generalized Ising models the momentum observable with the associated Fourier representation. The association of operators to observables permits the computation of expectation values in terms of the density matrix by the usual quantum rule. We show that probabilistic cellular automata are quantum systems in a formulation with discrete time steps and real wave functions. With a complex structure the evolution operator for automata can be expressed in terms of a Hamiltonian involving fermionic creation and annihilation operators. The time-local probabilistic information amounts to a subsystem of the overall probabilistic system which is correlated with its environment consisting of the past and future. Such subsystems typically involve probabilistic observables for which only a probability distribution for their possible measurement values is available. Incomplete statistics does not permit to compute classical correlation functions for arbitrary subsystem-observables. Bell's inequalities are not generally applicable.