Last year I attended Scott Aaronson's talk Hawking Quantum Wares at the Classical Complexity Bazaar. Being intrigued by his argument that "[e]ven if quantum mechanics hadn't existed, theoretical computer scientists would eventually have had to invent it", I have been thinking about how we can derive the first and second quantization in quantum mechanics from theoretical computer science.
First quantization is basically the quantization of properties of a unit quantum system and second quantization is the quantization of the electromagnetic field. Is there some way that theoretical computer science could entail these two ideas? I can recognize some "quantumnesses" in theoretical computer science, including
- enumeration of set elements,
- enumeration of interactions with oracles, and
- discrete states of Turing machine,
but I am having a hard time relating them to first and second quantization.