Quantum theory has traditionally – and not altogether unreasonably – been taken as a challenge to “realism” about physical theories. At the very least, the ways in which it is often formulated, presented and used suggest a non-realist understanding of the theory because the significance of the “state” of a system is described in terms of a catalogue of predictions. While protective measurement does not force one to give up on this standard view, it does support an alternative contention, namely, that the state of a physical system (a wave function, for example) has a somewhat more direct physical significance. I conclude with what I take to be the upshot of these observations for approaches to interpreting quantum theory and evaluating those interpretations. Introduction In 1993 I wrote an article (Dickson, 1995) about the scheme for protective measurement first described (to my knowledge) by Aharonov, Anandan and Vaidman (1993). There I claimed that protective measurement makes “realism” about quantum theory more attractive than it might otherwise have been. I still believe some form of that claim to be true, and I am grateful to the editor and to Cambridge University Press for the opportunity to say so in the manner that I'm inclined to now, 20 years later. Of course, the debates about the interpretation of quantum theory have moved on quite a bit in the intervening time. We've seen a rise to prominence of “subjectivist” interpretations, largely based on developments in quantum information theory (but with its own historical precedents, as Timpson (2010) has pointed out – see Fuchs (2002) for a landmark paper in the modern development, and Timpson (2013) for a thorough overview and evaluation). The various “many-somethings” (worlds, minds, perspectives, whatever) interpretations have, arguably, seen a rise in fortune as well.
Quantum theory has traditionally – and not altogether unreasonably – been taken as a challenge to “realism” about physical theories. At the very least, the ways in which it is often formulated, presented and used suggest a non-realist understanding of the theory because the significance of the “state” of a system is described in terms of a catalogue of predictions. While protective measurement does not force one to give up on this standard view, it does support an alternative contention, namely, that the state of a physical system (a wave function, for example) has a somewhat more direct physical significance. I conclude with what I take to be the upshot of these observations for approaches to interpreting quantum theory and evaluating those interpretations. Introduction In 1993 I wrote an article (Dickson, 1995) about the scheme for protective measurement first described (to my knowledge) by Aharonov, Anandan and Vaidman (1993). There I claimed that protective measurement makes “realism” about quantum theory more attractive than it might otherwise have been. I still believe some form of that claim to be true, and I am grateful to the editor and to Cambridge University Press for the opportunity to say so in the manner that I'm inclined to now, 20 years later. Of course, the debates about the interpretation of quantum theory have moved on quite a bit in the intervening time. We've seen a rise to prominence of “subjectivist” interpretations, largely based on developments in quantum information theory (but with its own historical precedents, as Timpson (2010) has pointed out – see Fuchs (2002) for a landmark paper in the modern development, and Timpson (2013) for a thorough overview and evaluation). The various “many-somethings” (worlds, minds, perspectives, whatever) interpretations have, arguably, seen a rise in fortune as well.
Introduction One of the crucial issues about protective measurements is the extent to which they provide (additional) grounds for some realist understanding of the wave function. This issue is notoriously subject to debate, which is not the aim of this chapter. Rather, this chapter aims at clarifying the further issue of the ontological picture corresponding to the realist understanding of the wave function possibly suggested by protective measurements. Oddly enough, proponents of a realist reading of protective measurements remain in general rather vague about ontology (see for instance Aharonov et al. (1993, 4624), who assimilate the wave function to an “extended object” without further details, or the brief and somewhat unprecise discussion in Dickson (1995, 135–136) of the interpretation of the wave function within Bohmian mechanics (BM) and within the theoretical framework elaborated by Ghirardi, Rimini and Weber (GRW); in this volume, Gao does propose a more elaborated ontological model for quantum mechanics (QM) based on protective measurements). Despite this vagueness (or maybe because of it), it seems that the most obvious ontological intuition resulting from protective measurements points towards some form of straightforward realism about the wave function understood in the sense of a real, physical field: indeed, protective measurements are claimed to allow measuring expectation values of observables on a single quantum system, thereby providing the possibility of reconstructing (i.e. “measuring” in some sense) the wave function of a single quantum system. Aharonov et al. (1996, 125) clearly express this intuition: “We can observe the expectations values of operators, and we can observe the density and the current of the Schrödinger wave. We can “see” in some sense the Schrödinger wave. This leads us to believe that it has physical reality.” Therefore, this kind of intuition seems in line with a realist conception of the wave function, according to which the wave function is considered as a real substantial, material in some sense) entity on its own (this view is often called “wave function realism”).
My view on the meaning of the quantum wave function and its connection to protective measurements is described. The wave function and only the wave function is the ontology of the quantum theory. Protective measurements support this view although they do not provide a decisive proof. A brief review of the discovery and the criticism of protective measurement is presented. Protective measurements with postselection are discussed. Introduction In the first graduate course of quantum mechanics I remember asking the question: “Can we consider the wave function as a description of a single quantum system?” I got no answer. Twelve years later, in South Carolina, after I completed my Ph.D. studies at Tel Aviv University under the supervision of Yakir Aharonov in which we developed the theory of weak measurements [1], I asked Aharonov: Can we use weak measurement to observe the wave function of a single particle? At that time I had already become a strong believer in the many-worlds interpretation (MWI) of quantum mechanics [2] and had no doubt that a single system is described by the wave function. Yakir Aharonov never shared with me the belief in the MWI. When we realized that using what is called now protective measurement , we can, under certain conditions, observe the wave function of a single quantum system, he was really excited by the result. At 1992 I was invited to a conference on the Foundations of Quantum Mechanics in Japan where I presented this result: “The Schrödinger wave is observable after all!”[3]. Then I went home to Tel Aviv where I finished writing a letter which received mixed reviews in Phys. Rev. Lett. , while Jeeva Anandan, working on the topic with Aharonov in South Carolina, wrote a paper accepted in Phys. Rev. A [4]. After acceptance of the PRA paper it was hard to fight the referees in PRL, but PLA accepted it immediately [5].
We examine the entanglement and state disturbance arising in a protective measurement and argue that these inescapable effects doom the claim that protective measurement establishes the reality of the wave function. An additional challenge to this claim results from the exponential number of protective measurements required to reconstruct multi-qubit states. We suggest that the failure of protective measurement to settle the question of the meaning of the wave function is entirely expected, for protective measurement is but an application of the standard quantum formalism, and none of the hard foundational questions can ever be settled in this way. Introduction From the start, the technical result of protective measurement has been suggested to have implications for the interpretation of quantum mechanics. Consider how Aharonov and Vaidman [2] chose to begin their original paper introducing the idea of protective measurement: We show that it is possible to measure the Schrödinger wave of a single quantum system. This provides a strong argument for associating physical reality with the quantum state of a single system.… Since then, the pioneers of protective measurement seem to have taken a more moderate stance. Vaidman [42], in a recent synopsis of protective measurement, concedes that the protective measurement procedure is not a proof that we should adopt one interpretation instead of the other, but it is a good testbed which shows advantages and disadvantages of various interpretations. Notwithstanding this more subtle perspective and a number of critical studies of the technical and foundational aspects of protective measurement, Gao [21] has maintained, if not amplified, the force of Aharonov and Vaidman's original argument: An immediate implication is that the result of a protective measurement, namely the expectation value of the measured observable in the measured state, reflects the actual physical property of the measured system, as the system is not disturbed after this result has been obtained. […]
Introduction It is a prima facie reasonable assumption that if a physical quantity is measurable, then it corresponds to a genuine physical property of the measured system. You can measure a person's mass because human beings have such a property. You can measure the average mass of a group of people because groups of people have such a collective property. And so on. Now it would be truly surprising – miraculous, perhaps – if you could determine the average mass of a group of people by making measurements on just one of them. To ascribe such a statistical property to an individual looks like a category mistake. At first glance, protective measurements seem to pull off just such a miracle, determining, for example, the expectation value of position for an ensemble of particles via a measurement performed on one of them. The lesson we are supposed to draw, of course, is that expectation values are not statistical properties at all, despite their name. Rather than being an average over an ensemble of systems, the expectation value of position for a particle is a physical property of the individual system, and the wave function, as the bearer of these properties, is a physical entity (Aharonov, Anandan and Vaidman, 1993). The protective measurement procedure has been challenged (Uffink, 1999; Gao, 2013; Uffink, 2013), but for present purposes I will assume that protective measurements exist, at least in principle, that are capable of revealing “statistical” properties like expectation values in a single measurement. My aim here is not to challenge the existence of such a physical procedure, but rather to explore the arguments that connect the existence of protective measurements with conclusions concerning the nature of physical reality. What protective measurements are sup- posed to show is that “epistemological” interpretations of the quantum state are untenable – that the wave function of a system must instead be interpreted “onto- logically” (Aharonov, Anandan and Vaidman, 1993: 4617).
In this book, I have argued that the wave function in quantum mechanics is real, and it represents the state of random discontinuous motion (RDM) of particles in three-dimensional space. Moreover, this picture of quantum ontology is complete in accounting for our definite experience, but it requires that the quantum dynamics be revised to include a stochastic, nonlinear evolution term resulting from the RDM of particles. Obviously I took a road less traveled by researchers in the foundations of quantum mechanics. In order to convince more readers that this road is deserved to be taken, I will review the main results of this book and discuss them in a broader context. The starting point of my road is protective measurements (Chapter 1). In 1993, this new method of measurement in quantum mechanics was discovered (Aharonov and Vaidman, 1993; Aharonov, Anandan, and Vaidman, 1993). Distinct from conventional projective measurements, protective measurement is a method for measuring the expectation value of an observable on a single quantum system. By a series of protective measurements, one can even measure the wave function of a single quantum system. Therefore, besides the Born rule for projective measurements, protective measurements provide another, more direct connection between the wave function and results of measurements, which is not probabilistic but definite. It can be expected that a definite connection between the wave function and results of measurements is more important for understanding the meaning of the wave function and searching for the ontology of quantum mechanics. However, it seems that this connection provided by protective measurements is still less well known today, and its significance has not been fully realized by most researchers, either. The first stop on my road is the reality of the wave function (Chapter 4). It is correct to say that protective measurements alone do not imply the reality of the wave function. An additional connection between the state of reality and results of measurements is needed.
Scientific realism has traditionally maintained that our best scientific theories can be regarded as more or less true and as representing the world as it is (more or less). However, one of our very best current theories—quantum mechanics—has famously resisted such a realist construal, threatening to undermine the realist stance altogether. The chapters in this volume carefully examine this tension and the reasons behind it, including the underdetermination generated by the multiplicity of formulations and interpretations of quantum physics, each presenting a different way the world could be. Authors in this volume offer a range of alternative ways forward: some suggest new articulations of realism, limiting our commitments in one way or another; others attempt to articulate a ‘third way’ between traditional forms of realism and antirealism, or are critical of such attempts. Still others argue that quantum theory itself should be reconceptualised, or at least alternative formulations should be considered in the hope of evading the problems faced by realism. And some examine the nature of these issues when moving beyond quantum mechanics to quantum field theory. Taken together they offer an exciting new set of perspectives on one of the most fundamental questions in the philosophy of modern physics: how can one be a realist about quantum theory, and what does this realism amount to?