Piero Scaruffi

These are excerpts and elaborations from my book "The Nature of Consciousness"

Information Loss The Dutch physicist Gerard’t Hooft (Quantum information and information loss in general relativity”, 1995) argued that Quantum Physics is Classical Physics after an information loss. This is yet another variation on Einstein’s “hidden variables” theory. Hooft noticed that classical variables can take any value, whereas quantum variables can take only some values. Thus, de facto, a classical system gives rise to a quantum system when it loses information. He thinks that this information loss can be due to some “dissipative forces”. We know that different starting conditions can lead to the same results because of dissipative forces in the macro-world. For example, if you throw two coins from the top of a skyscraper at different speeds, air friction will cause them to reach the ground at the same speed. The observer will conclude that nature only allows some discrete values for the speed of the coins, when in fact it is air friction that caused them to land at the same speed. Nature is classical at its most fundamental level, but quantum at the level of the laboratory because of “dissipation”.   Back to the beginning of the chapter "The New Physics" | Back to the index of all chapters