Jacques L. Pienaar

Science and the Wholeness of Life: How QBism grounds quantum theory in the reality of lived experience

Current Position: Collaborating Researcher at Universidade Federal do Rio de Janeiro

Bio: Jacques L. Pienaar is a South African born Australian physicist based in Brazil, whose research career has followed his personal quest to better understand the conceptual foundations of quantum mechanics. His PhD thesis, completed at the University of Queensland under the supervision of Timothy C. Ralph, investigated the deep link between causality and the linearity of quantum mechanics. He took his first postdoc under Časlav Brukner at the University of Vienna, where he was among the first to propose a calculus for quantum causal models. During his second postdoc at the International Institute of Physics in Natal, Brazil, he articulated a link between quantum causality and the interpretation known as QBism. He subsequently joined the QBism group of Christopher A. Fuchs at the University of Massachusetts Boston, first as a postdoc and then a Research Assistant Professor, where he studied QBism intensively and began to further elaborate its key ideas. From his position as Collaborating Researcher at the Physics Institute of the Universidade Federal do Rio de Janeiro, he is currently co-leading a large international multi-disciplinary project together with Prof. Fuchs, which aims to establish the philosophical underpinnings of quantum metrology by combining insights from phenomenology, epistemology of measurement, and QBism.