Physicist Caslav Brukner at the University of Vienna in Austria is researching whether quantum physics provides the ultimate description of reality or there are other more fundamental theories lying in wait, FQXi blogger Bob Swarup reports.

Some physicists hope to retrieve a classical concept of realism in which properties of the world about us exist regardless of whether or not we observe them. Brukner thinks information theory is the key to understanding quantum behavior, and since the total information that can be carried by a quantum system is finite, the system’s answers to some questions will contain an element of randomness.

Although most proposed alternatives to standard quantum mechanics have steadily fallen by the wayside, Brukner believes that this is because they all tried — mathematically and conceptually — to save some part of the pre-quantum concepts of classical physics. He wants to study alternatives that preserve the seemingly bizarre properties of quantum mechanics. “I want to investigate those theories, which, like quantum theory, are intrinsically probabilistic, allow superposition and entanglement, but may still differ.”