On 7/10/2018 3:01 PM, [email protected] wrote:
*IIRC, the above quote is also in the Wiki article. It's not a coherent argument; not even an argument but an ASSERTION. Let's raise the level of discourse. It says we always get a or b, no intermediate result when the system is in a superposition of states A and B.. Nothing new here. Key question: why does this imply the system is in states A and B SIMULTANEOUSLY before the measurement? AG *
Because, in theory and in some cases in practice, there is a direct measurement of the superposition state, call it C, such that you can directly measure C and always get c, but when you have measured and confirmed the system is in state c and then you measure A/B you get a or b at random. The easiest example is SG measurements of sliver atom spin orientation where spin UP can be measured left/right and get a LEFT or a RIGHT at random, but it can be measured up/down and you always get UP. Any particular orientation can be /written/ as a superposition of two orthogonal states.
This is true in general. Any state can be written as a superposition of states in some other basis. But it is not generally true that we can prepare or directly measure a system in any given state. So those states we can't directly access, we tend to think of them as existing only as superpositions of states we can prepare.
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