Losing Your Marbles in Wavefunction Collapse Theories

DOI10.1093/BJPS/50.4.697MaRDI QIDQ4518197zbMATH OpenOpenAlexFDO

Authors Rob Clifton, Bradley Monton

Publication date 6 August 2002

Published in The British Journal for the Philosophy of Science (Search for Journal in Brave)

Full work available at URL https://arxiv.org/abs/quant-ph/9905065

zbMATH Keywords

enumeration principlemacroscopic objectswavefunction collapse theory

Mathematics Subject Classification ID

General and philosophical questions in quantum theory (81P05) Quantum measurement theory, state operations, state preparations (81P15)

Abstract: Peter Lewis ([1997]) has recently argued that the wavefunction collapse theory of GRW (Ghirardi, Rimini, and Weber [1986]) can only solve the problem of wavefunction tails at the expense of predicting that arithmetic does not apply to ordinary macroscopic objects. More specifically, Lewis argues that the GRW theory must violate the enumeration principle: that `if marble 1 is in the box and marble 2 is in the box and so on through marble $n$, then all $n$ marbles are in the box' ([1997], p. 321). Ghirardi and Bassi ([1999]) have replied that it is meaningless to say that the enumeration principle is violated because the wavefunction Lewis uses to exhibit the violation cannot persist, according to the GRW theory, for more than a split second ([1999], p. 709). On the contrary, we argue that Lewis's argument survives Ghirardi and Bassi's criticism unscathed. We then go on to show that, while the enumeration principle can fail in the GRW theory, the theory itself guarantees that the principle can never be empirically falsified, leaving the applicability of arithmetical reasoning to both micro- and macroscopic objects intact.

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• Dynamical reduction models
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• Four tails problems for dynamical collapse theories
• Counting marbles: Reply to Clifton and Monton
• More about Dynamical Reduction and the Enumeration Principle
• Do Dynamical Reduction Models Imply that Arithmetic Does Not Apply to Ordinary Macroscopic Objects?
• Physics and causation
• The indeterminate present and the open future
• The problem of ontology for spontaneous collapse theories
• Interpreting spontaneous collapse theories
• Probability in GRW theory
• GRW as an ontology of dispositions
• Finding your marbles in wavefunction collapse theories
• In defence of naiveté: the conceptual status of Lagrangian quantum field theory

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