Marek Czachor - Böcker

The language of the universe is mathematics, but how exactly do you know that all parts of the universe "speak" the same language? Benioff builds on the idea that the entity that gives substance to both mathematics and physics is the fundamental field, called the "value field". While exploring this idea, he notices the similarities that the value field shares with several mysterious phenomena in modern physics: the Higgs field, and dark energy.The author first introduces the concept of the value field and uses it to reformulate the basic framework of number theory, calculus, and vector spaces and bundles. The book moves on to find applications to classical field theory, quantum mechanics and gauge theory. The last two chapters address the relationship between theory and experiment, and the possible physical consequences of both the existence and non-existence of the value field. The book is open-ended, and the list of open questions is certainly longer than the set of proposed answers.Paul Benioff, a pioneer in the field of quantum computing and the author of the first quantum-mechanical description of the Turing machine, devoted the last few years of his life to developing a universal description in which mathematics and physics would be on equal footing. He died on March 29, 2022, his work nearly finished. The final editing was undertaken by Marek Czachor who, in the editorial afterword, attempts to place the author's work in the context of a shift in the scientific paradigm looming on the horizon.

During the last decade, scientists working in quantum theory have been engaging in promising new fields such as quantum computation and quantum information processing, and have also been reflecting on the possibilities of nonlinear behavior on the quantum level. These are challenging undertakings because (1) they will result in new solutions to important technical and practical problems that were unsolvable by the classical approaches (for example, quantum computers can calculate problems that are intractable if one uses classical computers); and (2) they open up new 'hard' problems of a fundamental nature that touch the foundation of quantum theory itself (for example, the contradiction between locality and nonlinearity and the interpretation of quantum computing as a universal process).In this book, one can distinguish two main streams of research to approach the just-mentioned problem field: (1) a theoretical structural part, which concentrates on the elaboration of a nonlinear quantum mechanics and the fundamentals of quantum computation; and (2) a theoretical experimental part, which focuses on the theoretical aspects of applications that arise from new technology and novel research perspectives such as quantum optics and quantum cryptography. Particular attention is also paid to the measurement problem, the classical limit and alternative interpretations (such as the hidden measurement approach).