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Which Natural Processes Have the Special Status of Measurements?

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Abstract

We assume, in the first place, that two kinds of processes occur in nature: the strictly continuous and causal ones, which are governed by the Schrödinger equation and those implying discontinuities, which are ruled by probability laws. In the second place, we adopt a postulate ensuring the statistical sense of conservation laws. These hypotheses allow us to state a rule telling, in principle, in which situations and to which vectors the system's state can collapse, and which are the corresponding probabilities. The way our proposed approach works is illustrated with some examples and with the analysis of the measurement problem. We obtain the exponential decay law. A comparison with other attempts to solve the measurement problem is performed.

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Burgos, M.E. Which Natural Processes Have the Special Status of Measurements?. Foundations of Physics 28, 1323–1346 (1998). https://doi.org/10.1023/A:1018826910348

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