Gao, Shan
(2020)
Protective Measurements and the Reality of the Wave Function.
The British Journal for the Philosophy of Science.
ISSN 1464-3537
Abstract
It has been debated whether protective measurement implies the reality of the wave function. In this paper, I present a new analysis of the relationship between protective measurements and the reality of the wave function. First, I briefly introduce protective measurements and the ontological models framework for them. Second, I give a simple proof of Hardy's theorem in terms of protective measurements. Third, I analyze two suggested psi-epistemic models of a protective measurement. It is shown that although these models can explain the appearance of expectation values of observables in a single measurement, their predictions about the variance of the result of a non-ideal protective measurement are different from those of quantum mechanics. Finally, I argue that under an auxiliary finiteness assumption about the dynamics of the ontic state, protective measurement implies the reality of the wave function in the ontological models framework.
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