The Born rule for quantum probability calculations

Roderick I. Sutherland

Don Nelson Page

Abstract In ordinary situations involving a small part of the universe, Born's rule seems to work well for calculating probabilities of observations in quantum theory. However, there are a number of reasons for believing that it is not adequate for many cosmological purposes. Here a number of possible generalizations of Born's rule are discussed, explaining why they are consistent with the present statistical support for Born's rule in ordinary situations but can help solve various cosmological problems.

T. G. Philbin

The predictions of quantum mechanics are probabilistic. Quantum probabilities are extracted using a postulate of the theory called the Born rule, the status of which is central to the problem of quantum mechanics. Efforts to justify the Born rule from other physical principles, and thus elucidate the measurement process, have involved lengthy statistical or information-theoretic arguments. Here we show that Bohm's deterministic formulation of quantum mechanics allows the Born rule for measurements on a single system to be derived, without any statistical assumptions. We solve a simple example where the creation of an ensemble of identical quantum states, together with position measurements on those states, are described by Bohm's quantum dynamics. The calculated measurement outcomes agree with the Born-rule probabilities, which are thus a consequence of deterministic evolution. Our results demonstrate that quantum probabilities can emerge from simple dynamical laws alone, and they support the view that there is no underlying indeterminism in quantum phenomena.

Stanley Gudder

Leon W. Cohen

Don Nelson Page

A simple proof is given that the probabilities of observations in a large universe are not given directly by Born's rule as the expectation values of projection operators in a global quantum state of the entire universe. An alternative procedure is proposed for constructing an averaged density matrix for a random small region of the universe and then calculating observational probabilities indirectly by Born's rule as conditional probabilities, conditioned upon the existence of an observation.