About
Chiara Marletto is a Research Fellow at Wolfson College, University of Oxford.
Biography
Chiara's research interests are at the foundations of physics. Her research has focused on issues in Quantum Information Theory, Condensed-Matter Physics, Quantum Biology and Thermodynamics.
Some of her recent work has utilised a recently proposed generalisation of the quantum theory of information - constructor theory - to address issues at the foundations of the theory of control and causation in physics.
These include applications to defining general principles encompassing classical, quantum and post-quantum theories of information; and to assessing the compatibility of essential features of living systems, such as the ability to self-reproduce and evolve, with fundamental laws of physics, in particular with quantum theory.
They also include the definition of a new class of witnesses of non-classicality in systems that need not obey quantum theory, such as gravity; and a scale-independent definition of irreversibility, work and heat, based on constructor-theoretic ideas.
THE SCIENCE OF CAN AND CAN’T
A Physicist’s Journey Through the Land of Counterfactuals
A luminous guide to how the radical new science of counterfactuals can reveal the full scope of our universe
There is a vast class of properties that science has so far almost entirely neglected. These properties are central to an understanding of physical reality both at an everyday level and at the level of fundamental phenomena, yet they have traditionally been thought of as impossible to incorporate into fundamental explanations. They relate not only to what is true - the actual - but to what could be true - the counterfactual.
This is the science of can and can't.
