Measurement, interpretation and information

TL;DR

This paper discusses the modal-Hamiltonian interpretation of quantum mechanics, addressing measurement reliability issues and proposing an information-based criterion that depends solely on measurement devices rather than system states.

Contribution

It introduces an informational perspective to define measurement reliability criteria independent of the measured system's properties.

Findings

The modal-Hamiltonian interpretation effectively addresses measurement problems.

A new criterion for measurement reliability based on measurement devices is proposed.

The criterion is independent of the measured system's specific state.

Abstract

During many years since the birth of quantum mechanics, instrumentalist interpretations prevailed: the meaning of the theory was expressed in terms of measurements results. But in the last decades, several attempts to interpret it from a realist viewpoint have been proposed. Among them, modal interpretations supply a realist non-collapse account, according to which the system always has definite properties and the quantum state represents possibilities, not actualities. However, the traditional modal interpretations faced some conceptual problems when addressing imperfect measurements. The modal-Hamiltonian interpretation, on the contrary, proved to be able to supply an adequate account of the measurement problem, both in its ideal and its non-ideal versions. Moreover, in the non-ideal case, it gives a precise criterion to distinguish between reliable and non-reliable measurements. Nevertheless, that criterion depends on the particular state of the measured system, and this might be considered as a shortcoming of the proposal. In fact, one could ask for a criterion of reliability that does not depend on the features of what is measured but only on the properties of the measurement device. The aim of this article is precisely to supply such a criterion: we will adopt an informational perspective for this purpose.