Measurement and Metaphysics
نویسنده
چکیده
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 persons 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 rst glance, protective measurements seem to pull o¤ 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 (U¢ nk, 1999; Gao, 2013; U¢ nk, 2013), but for present purposes I will assume that protective measurements exist, at least in principle, that are capable of revealing statisticalproperties 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
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