Wigner's friend scenarios: on what to condition and how to verify the predictions
arXiv:2407.06279 · doi:10.1103/c3yq-9mc7
Abstract
Wigner's friend experiment and its modern extensions display the ambiguity of the quantum mechanical description regarding the assignment of quantum states. While the friend applies the state-update rule to the system upon observing an outcome of her measurement in a quantum system, Wigner describes the friend's measurement as a unitary evolution, resulting in an entangled state for the composite system of the friend and the system. In this respect, Wigner is often referred to as a "superobserver" who has the supreme technological ability to keep the friend's laboratory coherent. As such, it is often argued that he has the "correct" description of the state. Here we show that the situation is more symmetrical than is usually thought: there are different types of information that each of the observers has that the other fundamentally cannot have - they reside in different "bubbles" (in Calvalcanti's terminology). While this can explain why the objectivity of the state assignment is only relative to the bubble, we consider more elaborated situations in the form of a game in which the players can switch between bubbles. We find that, in certain circumstances, observers may be entitled to adopt and verify the state assignment from another bubble if they condition their predictions on \textit{all} information that is in principle available to them.
8 pages + appendices
References in corpus (12)
- Quantum Darwinism
- Quantum Decoherence
- Magnetotransport of dirty-limit van Hove singularity quasiparticles
- Physics and Metaphysics of Wigner's Friends: Even performed pre-measurements have no results
- The view from a Wigner bubble
- A "thoughtful" Local Friendliness no-go theorem: a prospective experiment with new assumptions to suit
- A possibilistic no-go theorem on the Wigner's friend paradox
- Perspectival Quantum Realism
- Everettian probabilities, the Deutsch-Wallace theorem and the Principal Principle
- Quantum mechanical rules for observed observers and the consistency of quantum theory
- Wigner's friend's memory and the no-signaling principle
- Classical information and collapse in Wigner's friend setups