Tuesday, April 26, 2016

quantum mechanics - Is the wave function objective or subjective?



Here is a question I am curious about.


Is the wave function objective or subjective, or is such a question meaningless?


Conventionally, subjectivity is as follows: if a quantity is subjective then it is possible for two different people to legitimately give it different values. For example, in Bayesian probability theory, probabilities are considered subjective, because two agents with access to different data will have different posteriors.


So suppose two scientists, A and B, have access to different information about the same quantum system. If A believes it has one wavefunction and B believes it has another, is one of them necessarily "right" and the other "wrong"? If so then the wavefunction is objective, but otherwise it must contain some subjective element.




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