Someone just introduced me to Constructor Theory. This is a new theory of information which attempts to express all physics in terms of a difference between possible and impossible physical transformation. The idea is more or less to take the success of Shannon in the classical realm and apply it to the quantum realm. David Deutsch and Chiara Marletto at Oxford have been the main people working on it.
The big difference from traditional formulations of physics is that it inverts the usual conclusions. Instead of the laws of physics telling you what is possible or not, you get the laws from basic considerations of what’s possible or not given a given physical structure. Those of you who are familiar with thermodynamics might know that you can derive the laws of thermodynamics in a very similar way - while I don’t know their history I wonder if that’s the genesis for this approach. Upon reading it, the theory sounds very Peircean. I was curious if anyone here has done any reading along those lines. http://arxiv.org/abs/1210.7439 <http://arxiv.org/abs/1210.7439> There’s also a recent writeup at Medium with a more populist description. https://medium.com/the-physics-arxiv-blog/deeper-than-quantum-mechanics-david-deutschs-new-theory-of-reality-9b8281bc793a
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