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Philosophy of Science

Van Fraassen and Ruetsche on Preparation and Measurement

Bradley Monton

Published Jan 1, 1999• 19 citations
Publisher

Abstract

Ruetsche (1996) has argued that van Fraassen's (1991) Copenhagen Variant of the Modal Interpretation (CVMI) gives unsatisfactory accounts of measurement and of state preparation. I defend the CVMI against Ruetsche's first argument by using decoherence to show that the CVMI does not need to account for the measurement scenario which Ruetsche poses. I then show, however, that there is a problem concerning preparation, and the problem is more serious than the one Ruetsche focuses on. The CVMI makes no substantive predictions for the everyday processes we take to be measurements.

DOI
10.1086/392717

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Ruetsche (1996) has argued that van Fraassen's (1991) Copenhagen Variant of the Modal Interpretation (CVMI) gives unsatisfactory accounts of measurement and of state preparation. I defend the CVMI against Ruetsche's first argument by using decoherence to show that the CVMI does not need to account for the measurement scenario which Ruetsche poses. I then show, however, that there is a problem concerning preparation, and the problem is more serious than the one Ruetsche focuses on. The CVMI makes no substantive predictions for the everyday processes we take to be measurements.
Van Fraassen’s 1991 modal interpretation of Quantum Mechanics offers accounts of measurement and state preparation. I argue that both accounts overlook a class of interactions I call General Unitary Measurements, or GUMs. Ironically, GUMs are significant for van Fraassen’s account of measurement because they challenge it, and significant for his account of preparation because they simplify it. Van Fraassen’s oversight prompts a question about modal interpretations: developed to account for ideal measurement outcomes, can they consistently account as well for the whole horizon of laboratory practices by which we investigate QM?
Although there has been some discussion in the literature of Bas van Fraassen's modal interpretation of Quantum Mechanics, it has for the most part been concentrated on difficulties that van Fraassen's viewpoint shares with those of some other authors, including Kochen, Dieks, and Healey. van Fraassen's approach has, however, some problems of its own; in this note we want to focus on what seems to us to be one of the most serious of these. The difficulty concerns immediately repeated non-disturbing measurements of the same observable on a single system. As is well known, von Neumann's Projection Postulate guarantees that such measurements will always give the same outcome; likewise, in the approaches of the “modalists” mentioned above, such ‘consilience of repeated measurements’ is in one way or another built into the formalism. By contrast, we shall argue, van Fraassen's modal interpretation neither guarantees this result nor adequately explains why it is unnecessary to do so.
Bas van Fraassen advocates a “Copenhagen variant” of the modal interpretation of quantum mechanics. However, he believes that the Copenhagen approach to measurement is not fully satisfactory, since it seems to rule out the possibility of providing a physical account of the observation process. This was also what John Wheeler had in mind when, in the mid-1950’s, he sponsored the “relative state” formulation proposed by his student Hugh Everett. Wheeler, who considered himself an orthodox Bohrian, tried to convince Bohr to accept the improvement of the Copenhagen approach represented in his eyes by Everett’s proposal. This attempt gave rise to a lively debate, which has been only recently documented, and which provides an interesting framework for the appraisal of van Fraassen’s own programme.
Bas van Fraassen in [4] has recently tried to use modal logic to solve the measurement problem of quantum mechanics. His model is based on a method of expressing quantum states developed by Hugh Everett [1] called the “relative state formulation.” Unfortunately, Everett's mathematics cannot be generalized as van Fraassen requires. The difficulty itself is elementary enough. But a revision of van Fraassen's postulates (such as the one he adopted on p. 341 after he had been told of the problem) can save the mathematics only on pain of making the whole study irrelevant to the physics. I shall explain the dilemma in this note. In a later paper [5], van Fraassen avoids this dilemma by developing an abstract modal interpretation which does not rely on any expression for quantum states.
It has been suggested that the Modal Interpretation of Quantum Mechanics (QM) is "incomplete" if it lacks a dynamics for possessed values. I argue that this is only one of two possible attitudes one might adopt toward a Modal Interpretation without dynamics. According to the other attitude, such an interpretation is a complete interpretation of QM as standardly formulated, an interpretation whose innovation is to attempt to make sense of the quantum realm without the expedient of novel physics. Then I explain why this attitude, though available, is unattractive. Without dynamics, the Modal Interpretation vanquishes the measurement problem only, it seems, to succumb to the problem of state preparation. On this view, the Modal Interpretation needs dynamics not to be an interpretation at all, but to be an adequate one. I review reasons to suspect that the dynamics which would best suit the Modal Interpretation--a dynamics equivalent to a set of two time transition probabilities of the sort used to solve the preparation problem--is not a dynamics the interpretation can have. I close with a brief discussion of versions of the Modal Interpretation that may not succumb to the considerations presented here.