Wave Function Collapse, Lorentz Invariance, and the Third Postulate of Relativity
The changes that quantum states undergo during measurement are both probabilistic and nonlocal. These two characteristics complement one another to insure compatibility with relativity and maintain conservation laws. Nonlocal entanglement relations provide a means to enforce conservation laws in a p...
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Zusammenfassung: | The changes that quantum states undergo during measurement are both
probabilistic and nonlocal. These two characteristics complement one another to
insure compatibility with relativity and maintain conservation laws. Nonlocal
entanglement relations provide a means to enforce conservation laws in a
probabilistic theory, while the probabilistic nature of nonlocal effects
prevents the superluminal transmission of information. In order to explain
these measurement-induced changes in terms of fundamental physical processes it
is necessary to take these two key characteristics into account. One way to do
this is to modify the Schroedinger equation by adding stochastic, nonlinear
terms. A number of such proposals have been made over the past few decades. A
recently proposed equation based on the assumption that wave function collapse
is induced by a sequence of correlating interactions of the kind that
constitute measurements has been shown to maintain strict adherence to
conservation laws in individual instances, and has also eliminated the need to
introduce any new, ad hoc physical constants. In this work it is shown that
this modified Schroedinger equation is naturally Lorentz invariant. It is
further argued that the additional spacetime structure that it requires
provides a way to implement the assumption that spacelike-separated operators
(and measurements) commute, and that this assumption of local commutativity
should be regarded as a third postulate of relativity. |
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DOI: | 10.48550/arxiv.2405.05335 |