The suggestive properties of quantum mechanics without the collapse postulate

Jeffrey Alan Barrett

Guido Bacciagaluppi, Elise Crull

This is a reprinting of Margenau’s response to EPR (and to some extent, his evaluation of previous responses to EPR by Bohr, Kemble and Ruark). Margenau’s contribution to the EPR debate is certainly one of the most original, no doubt at least in part due to the meaty correspondence he had with Einstein while producing it. Margenau’s main strategy in this paper is to argue against the standard collapse postulate of quantum mechanics, suggesting that the EPR argument only applies to quantum mechanics with this postulate added. He also argues against the statistical interpretation of the collapse postulate suggested by Kemble and others.

Elias P. Gyftopoulos

Interpretations of key concepts, such as uncertainty relations, kinetic energy, value of an observable, probability distributions, the projection or collapse of a wave function postulate, and discrete versus continuous values, that appear in several excellent textbooks on quantum mechanics are reviewed and found not to be consistent with our current understanding of quantum theory. Possible alternatives are suggested.

Dipankar Home, M. A. B. Whitaker

Sumio Wada

We argue that quantum mechanics makes sense without such controversial postulates as the wave function collapse, the quantum probability rule and the observable postulate. We only need the existence of a wave function as a representation of a state, its dynamical evolution rule and another rather trivial postulate proposed here (Read-Off Postulate). The wave function collapse and the probability rule are replaced with intrinsic properties of the theory, i.e. decoherence and relative frequency, respectively. Interpretation of the wave function as a faithful representation of the reality naturally emerges, although quantum reality has a peculiar feature which distinguishes it from classical reality.

Jeffrey Bub