>VITAE:
Robert Spekkens is a Canada/USA Royal Society research fellow in the Department of Applied Mathematics and Theoretical Physics at Cambridge University. His main field of interest is the foundations of quantum mechanics. Recently, his research has focussed on three topics: the resource theory of quantum reference frames, classical theories with an epistemic restriction as foils to quantum theory, and a generalization of the traditional notion of contextuality as an umbrella for notions of nonclassicality.

I will discuss a toy theory that reproduces a wide variety of qualitative features of quantum theory for degrees of freedom that are continuous. The ontology of the theory is that of classical particle mechanics, but it is assumed that there is a constraint on the amount of knowledge that an observer may have about the motional state of any collection of particles -- Liouville mechanics with an epistemic restriction. The formalism of the theory is determined by examining the consequences of this "classical uncertainty principle" on state preparations, measurements, and dynamics. The result is a theory of hidden variables that can be shown to be equivalent to Gaussian quantum mechanics.