Wojciech Hubert Zurek
Laboratory Fellow in the Theory Division, Los Alamos National Laboratory
Wojciech Zurek is a theoretical physicist based at Los Alamos National Laboratory in New Mexico. He received his MSc from the AGH University of Science and Technology in Krakow, in his native Poland, and his PhD in 1979 from the faculty of physics at the University of Texas at Austin. He remained there as a postdoctoral fellow of Professor John Archibald Wheeler until 1981, when he joined the California Institute of Technology as Tolman Fellow. Zurek arrived in Los Alamos in 1984 as an Oppenheimer Fellow. In 1991, he assumed leadership of Theoretical Astrophysics Group, and, in 1996, was appointed Laboratory Fellow in Theory Division. Zurek served as an external faculty member at the Santa Fe Institute, and has been a visiting professor at the University of California, Santa Barbara, where he co-organized the programs Quantum Coherence and Decoherence and Quantum Computing and Chaos at UCSB's Institute for Theoretical Physics.
Zurek has received numerous awards and distinctions, including Phi Beta Kappa Visiting Lecturer Award (2004), Alexander von Humboldt Prize (2005), Marian Smoluchowski Medal (2009), Einstein Visiting Professorship (Universität Ulm, 2010-2015), Los Alamos Medal (2014), and the titles of Doctor Honoris Causa of the Jagiellonian University (2019) and AGH University of Science and Technology (2021). His most influential contributions include decoherence theory, no-cloning theorem, and the Kibble-Zurek mechanism.
SFI Press Books
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The specter of information is haunting sciences. With these words, Wojciech H. Zurek invited fellow scientists to attend the 1989 Santa Fe Institute workshop on which this proceedings volume is based. Thermodynamics, statistical mechanics, the quantum theory of measurement, the physics of computation, dynamical systems, molecular biology, and computer science — information remains central to the 32 essays collected in this new edition of Complexity, Entropy & the Physics of Information.
Like the original meeting, this two-volume reprint explores the connections between quantum and classical physics, information and its transfer, computation, and their significance for the formulation of physical theories. A newly written introduction from attendee Seth Lloyd contextualizes the significance of this record of a meeting that marked the intersection of information, physics, complexity, and computation.