THE mathematical framework behind quantum theory, one of the key scientific
developments of the 20th century, could have been discovered by scientists
almost a century earlier, says a British physicist.
“It’s a generalisation of classical probability theory,” says Lucien Hardy, a
Royal Society research fellow at the University of Oxford. “A clever person
could have stumbled on it in the early 19th century.” But the realisation that
it applied to the real world would still have come about only after experiments
began to probe the realm of atoms.
Hardy sees parallels with the general theory of relativity, Einstein’s theory
of…
