nucleation

LIT-1640: Quantum Darwinism

1 min read

Properties5
StatusActive — read in full 2026-10-27 (NOTE-1229), from the arXiv text; worth reading as the author's own synthesis of einselection, redundancy and envariance. Its repeatability argument (eq. 5) is clean; its redundancy results are cited model calculations; its step from redundancy to objectivity is an identification, and it does not contain the later caveat about mutual information that the exchange attributed to other work.
Version2
Tagsquantum-foundations, information-theory
Cited as “paper” byNOTE-1229 — Zurek — Quantum Darwinism
Cited as “source” byTHEORY-1053 — Under unitary evolution, two states of a quantum system can each leave a record in another system while themselves staying undisturbed only if they are orthogonal or the record does not distinguish them; so the outcomes that can be recorded repeatably form an orthogonal set, a result that uses only unitarity and repeatability and not the Born rule, THEORY-1055 — In models of decoherence, the information a small fraction of the environment holds about a system rises steeply to a plateau at the system's entropy H_S, so many disjoint fragments each carry nearly all of it, and this redundancy is high only for the pointer observable; Zurek identifies it with objective existence, many observers learning the pointer state independently and without disturbing the system, though the paper argues and does not prove that a plateau in mutual information gives each observer the same record

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Zurek, W. H. (2009). Quantum Darwinism. Nature Physics, 5(3), 181–188. doi:10.1038/nphys1202.

Read in full on 2026-10-27 (NOTE-1229).

Why this is here

A19 §4 used it for a progression from interaction to correlation, persistent record, redundant record and intersubjectively accessible fact, with the caveat, which A19 sourced to spectrum-broadcast-structure and strong-Darwinism work it did not name, that mutual information alone does not guarantee independently accessible records. It bears on QUESTION-285.

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