In the beginning was the bit
par
Introduction plutôt accessible aux tentatives de l’autrichien Anton Zeilinger de refonder la mécanique quantique sur des principes simples et non contestables.
Ce travail inachevé repose sur l’association d’un bit d’information au quantum de matière, rejoignant ainsi le premier étage de l’économie de l’univers.
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Zeilinger’s conceptual leap is to associate bits with the building blocks of the material world. In quantum mechanics, these building blocks are called elementary systems, and the archetypal elementary system is the spin of an electron. The only possible outcomes of measuring an electron’s spin are "up" and "down". You can choose any axis to measure the spin along—vertical, horizontal or tilted—but once that axis is chosen, only the two results are possible, as if the electron were a spinning top that can be one way up or the other, but can’t point to any intermediate direction. These outcomes could just as well be labelled "yes" and "no", or, in the fashion of digital computers, "1" and "0".
