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Bulletin de la Classe des sciences

A note on macroscopic measurement

A. C. Biswas

Published Jan 1, 1967• 0 citations
Publisher

Abstract

An attempt has been made to understand the process of measurement in terms of Statistical Mechanics.
DOI
10.3406/barb.1967.62815

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Using very general and well established ideas of the statistical physics of macroscopic bodies, that is, of those composed of many degrees of freedom, we show how classical behavior of the center of mass motion arises from a fully quantum mechanical description of the dynamics of the whole body. We do not attempt to provide a rigorous proof of the latter statement, but rather, we show or, at least, indicate the hypotheses needed to obtain the purported result. Moreover, we neither attempt to deal with the "most general" physical situation and, instead, we concentrate on a stylized model of a small solid, yet macroscopic, that we shall call a "little stone". The main hypothesis is that a macroscopic body can be decomposed into several smaller pieces, still macroscopic, that become statistically independent due to the short-range interaction nature of their constituent atoms. The ensuing main result is that the quantum distributions of extensive variables of the body become sharply-peaked. The center of mass variables are of this type and hence their dynamics is essentially classical. We point out the crucial role played by the external potential, in which the motion occurs, as the macroscopic agent that executes the "measurement" process of the center of mass.
Much of the recent discussion of problematic aspects of quantum-mechanical measurement centers around that feature of quantum theory which is called “the projection postulate.” This is roughly the claim that a change of a certain sort occurs in the state of a physical system when a measurement is made on the system. In this paper an argument for the projection postulate due to von Neumann is considered. Attention is focused on trying to provide an understanding of the notion of “the state of a physical system” which is compatible with the argument von Neumann offers. An attempt is made to formulate the argument in terms of an objectivistic interpretation of probability concepts. It is seen that such an interpretation does not provide a suitable way of understanding the argument. An attempt is made to illustrate the source of this failure in terms of a non-quantum-mechanical example.