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No Relation for Wigner’s Friend

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Abstract

We argue that Wigner’s friend thought experiment does not support observer dependence of quantum states. An analysis in terms of history vectors suggests that quantum collapse is to be understood as collapse of histories rather than collapse of states.

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Notes

  1. i.e. a measurement of an observable having |0〉 and |1〉 as eigenvectors.

  2. For an introduction to this subject, see for example the book by A. Peres [6].

  3. since they are eigenvectors of a “position of the pointer” observable.

  4. besides the obvious system of reference dependence of position, velocities etc.

  5. The CNOT is a two-qubit gate acting on the computational basis as as \(|0{\rangle }|0{\rangle } \rightarrow |0\rangle |0\rangle \), \(|0\rangle |1\rangle \rightarrow |0\rangle |1\rangle \), \(|1\rangle |0\rangle \rightarrow |1\rangle |1\rangle \), \(|1\rangle |1\rangle \rightarrow |1\rangle |0\rangle \), the first qubit being the control and the second being the target.

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Acknowledgements

We thank Eric Cavalcanti and Carlo Rovelli for correspondence on recent experiments. This work is supported by the research funds of the Eastern Piedmont University and INFN - Torino Section.

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Correspondence to Leonardo Castellani.

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Castellani, L. No Relation for Wigner’s Friend. Int J Theor Phys 60, 2084–2089 (2021). https://doi.org/10.1007/s10773-021-04826-9

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