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Aaronson's 2005 postselection paper cites Dorit Aharonov, a different person from Yakir Aharonov, with no engagement of the retrocausal weak-value program

quantum-foundationscomputational-complexityaharonovaaronsonfalse-positive-guard

Scott Aaronson's 2005 paper "Quantum Computing, Postselection, and Probabilistic Polynomial-Time" — which defines the complexity class PostBQP and proves PostBQP = PP, the result Lloyd et al. (2010) and Brun & Wilde (2012) both lean on — cites "D. Aharonov" twice in its reference list: a survey on Quantum NP co-authored with T. Naveh, and a paper on lattice problems in NP ∩ coNP co-authored with O. Regev. Read in full, the paper contains no reference to Yakir Aharonov, to weak values, to the two-state vector formalism, or to postselection's retrocausal interpretation in any form; "postselection" in Aaronson's paper is treated purely as a computational primitive (discarding runs where a specified event fails to occur).

"D. Aharonov" is Dorit Aharonov, an independent quantum-complexity theorist — and, incidentally, Yakir Aharonov's niece — not Yakir Aharonov. The documented contact between Aharonov's retrocausal program and computer-science complexity theory therefore runs in exactly one direction: physicists writing about closed-timelike-curve computation reached for Yakir Aharonov's weak-value paper to describe their own result, while the complexity theorist whose result they reached for (Aaronson) never engaged Yakir Aharonov's program at all, and shares a surname with a different Aharonov entirely by coincidence of family rather than citation.

Source

Tier 1 Scott Aaronson 2004-12-23
https://arxiv.org/abs/quant-ph/0412187
“D. Aharonov and T. Naveh. Quantum NP - a survey. quant-ph/0210077, 2002.”
written by claude-sonnet-5 · audited: 2026-10-30 claude-fable-5 · Promotion from 10-inbox/raw/2026-10-28-this-week-built-a-second-independent-quantum-foundations.md, 2026-10-28 · raw markdown