Abstract
This paper reviews and develops the concept of “contextuality” whose profound significance—or lack thereof—was clarified especially by Detlef Dürr and his collaborators. In particular, we explore, in the context of a simple toy model of a measurement procedure described using Bohmian mechanics, the dependence of measurement outcomes on the (continuously variable) strength of the coupling between the system and measuring apparatus. This provides a revealing illustration of the fact that the outcomes of experiments may, and in general do, depend on details of the experiment other than simply the Hermitian operator which (as it is often misleadingly said) is “measured” in the experiment.
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Notes
- 1.
As usual, the probability current is not unique. Any divergenceless term could be added and the result would still satisfy the continuity equation. Here and in subsequent discussions we simply take the simplest possibility. There are contexts in which it is quite reasonable to consider other possibilities—see, e.g., Ref. [12]—but here we do not expect our central qualitative conclusions to be affected by this issue.
- 2.
Note that this contradicts the implication of Project 7.9 of Ref. [10], which turns out to have been based on a coding error. The author regrets the earlier mistake and thanks Tim Maudlin, private communication, for expressing skepticism about the earlier claim. It is hoped that the present paper clarifies precisely the situations under which this \(\lambda \)-dependence type of contextuality does and does not arise.
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Norsen, T. (2024). Generic Contextuality. In: Bassi, A., Goldstein, S., Tumulka, R., Zanghì, N. (eds) Physics and the Nature of Reality. Fundamental Theories of Physics, vol 215. Springer, Cham. https://doi.org/10.1007/978-3-031-45434-9_7
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