Chiara Marletto

Dr Chiara Marletto is a Research Fellow at Wolfson College, University of Oxford. Her research lies at the foundations of physics and focuses on questions in quantum information theory, condensed matter physics, quantum biology and thermodynamics. She is the author of The Science of Can and Can’t: A Physicist’s Journey Through the Land of Counterfactuals (Viking, 2021), where she introduces constructor theory, a new framework for understanding the physical world in terms of what can and cannot happen.

Her recent work uses this generalisation of quantum information theory to explore fundamental questions about control and causation in physics. This includes developing general principles that connect classical, quantum and post-quantum theories of information, and examining whether essential features of living systems, such as self-reproduction and evolution, are compatible with the basic laws of physics, particularly quantum theory.

She has also contributed to defining new ways of detecting non-classical behaviour in systems that may not follow quantum theory, such as gravity, and to formulating a scale-independent understanding of irreversibility, work and heat based on constructor-theoretic ideas.