I would like to make a confession which may seem immoral: I do not believe absolutely in Hilbert space any more.
— John von Neumann, letter to Garrett Birkhoff, 1935.
The mathematics: Let us consider the raison d’ˆetre for the Hilbert space formalism. So why would one need all this ‘Hilbert space stuff, i.e. the continuum structure, the field structure of complex numbers, a vector space over it, inner-product structure, etc. Why? According to von Neumann, he simply used it because it happened to be ‘available’. The use of linear algebra and complex numbers in so many different scientific areas, as well as results in model theory, clearly show that quite a bit of modeling can be done using Hilbert spaces. On the other hand, we can also model any movie by means of the data stream that runs through your cables when watching it. But does this mean that these data streams make up the stuff that makes a movie? Clearly not, we should rather turn our attention to the stuff that is being taught at drama schools and directing schools. Similarly, von Neumann turned his attention to the actual physical concepts behind quantum theory, more specifically, the notion of a physical property and the structure imposed on these by the peculiar nature of quantum observation. His quantum logic gave the resulting ‘algebra of physical properties’ a privileged role. All of this leads us to … the physics of it. Birkhoff and von Neumann crafted quantum logic in order to emphasize the notion of quantum superposition. In terms of states of a physical system and properties of that system, superposition means that the strongest property which is true for two distinct states is also true for states other than the two given ones. In order-theoretic terms this means, representing states by the atoms of a lattice of properties, that the join p ∨ q of two atoms p and q is also above other atoms. From this it easily follows that the distributive law breaks down: given atom r ≠ p, q with r < p ∨ q we have r ∧ (p ∨ q) = r while (r ∧ p) ∨ (r ∧ q) = 0 ∨ 0 = 0. Birkhoff and von Neumann as well as many others believed that understanding the deep structure of superposition is the key to obtaining a better understanding of quantum theory as a whole.
For Schrödinger, this is the behavior of compound quantum systems, described by the tensor product. While the quantum information endeavor is to a great extend the result of exploiting this important insight, the language of the field is still very much that of strings of complex numbers, which is akin to the strings of 0’s and 1’s in the early days of computer programming. If the manner in which we describe compound quantum systems captures so much of the essence of quantum theory, then it should be at the forefront of the presentation of the theory, and not preceded by continuum structure, field of complex numbers, vector space over the latter, etc, to only then pop up as some secondary construct. How much quantum phenomena can be derived from ‘compoundness + epsilon’. It turned out that epsilon can be taken to be ‘very little’, surely not involving anything like continuum, fields, vector spaces, but merely a ‘2D space’ of temporal composition and compoundness, together with some very natural purely operational assertion, including one which in a constructive manner asserts entanglement; among many other things, trace structure then follows.
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