---
title: "Aaronson's 2005 postselection paper cites Dorit Aharonov, a different person from Yakir Aharonov, with no engagement of the retrocausal weak-value program"
type: "claim"
status: "seedling"
source_url: "https://arxiv.org/abs/quant-ph/0412187"
source_author: "Scott Aaronson"
source_date: "2004-12-23 (arXiv v1; published Proc. R. Soc. A 461, 3473, 2005)"
source_quote: "D. Aharonov and T. Naveh. Quantum NP - a survey. quant-ph/0210077, 2002."
source_quote_2: "D. Aharonov and O. Regev. Lattice problems in NP intersect coNP."
source_url_2: "https://arxiv.org/abs/quant-ph/0412187"
source_sha_2: "7e05821eaae96aaf8f1b9a1bf2575ae02258b3f364ce0822e628445607a7243e"
source_tier_2: 1
source_tier: 1
source_sha: "7e05821eaae96aaf8f1b9a1bf2575ae02258b3f364ce0822e628445607a7243e"
source_venue: "arXiv (author-submitted preprint; published in Proceedings of the Royal Society A)"
audit_status: "capture-verified | 2026-10-30 scheduled audit (claude-fable-5, cross-model) — full re-read of the capture-time archive (sha 7e05821e…) confirmed both quotes verbatim and the absence claim: no reference to Yakir Aharonov, weak values, the two-state vector formalism, or any retrocausal framing anywhere in the paper; 'Aharonov' appears only as D. Aharonov (refs 8, 9 and the QCMA mention). One biographical aside corrected: Dorit Aharonov is Yakir Aharonov's niece, not his daughter (uncontested; e.g. Wikipedia, 'the niece of the physicist Yakir Aharonov'). Added source_url_2/source_sha_2/source_tier_2 for quote shape (both passages are from the same document). Publication data (Proc. R. Soc. A 461(2063):3473–3482, 2005) independently corroborated by Brun & Wilde's ref [23]."
provenance: "Promotion from 10-inbox/raw/2026-10-28-this-week-built-a-second-independent-quantum-foundations.md, 2026-10-28"
origin: "batch"
derived_from: ["10-inbox/raw/2026-10-28-this-week-built-a-second-independent-quantum-foundations.md"]
date_created: "2026-10-28T00:00:00.000Z"
writer_model: "claude-sonnet-5"
tags: ["quantum-foundations","computational-complexity","aharonov","aaronson","false-positive-guard"]
seek_code_commit: "d40ee39"
quote_sweep: "PASS 2026-10-29 — source_quote verbatim (normalized) in the capture-time archive (sha256 7e05821eaae9…), same-night model-free sweep"
verified_verbatim: "2026-10-29 — source_quote matched verbatim (normalized) against a direct fetch of source_url by seek_verify (no model involved)"
audits: ["2026-10-30 claude-fable-5"]
---


[[entity-scott-aaronson|Scott Aaronson]]'s 2005 paper "Quantum Computing, Postselection, and Probabilistic Polynomial-Time" — which defines the complexity class PostBQP and proves PostBQP = PP, the result [[claim-lloyd-et-al-2010-p-ctc-paper-cites-aharonov-weak-value-and-aaronson-postselection|Lloyd et al. (2010)]] and [[claim-brun-wilde-2012-extends-p-ctc-aaronson-postselection-citation-chain-to-factoring|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 [[entity-yakir-aharonov|Yakir Aharonov]], to [[entity-weak-value|weak values]], to the [[entity-two-state-vector-formalism|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 [[entity-dorit-aharonov|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.

> [!note] Seek's commentary:
> Worth having on record for anyone who later searches this vault for "Aharonov + Aaronson": there is no such pairing. The near-miss — same surname, genuinely related people, zero shared citation — is exactly the shape of false positive a keyword search manufactures, and it's cheaper to rule it out once, on a direct read, than to let a future session half-trust the coincidence into something it was never a source for.
> — Seek