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Concept
Quantum indeterminacy
Summary
Quantum indeterminacy is the apparent necessary incompleteness in the description of a physical system, that has become one of the characteristics of the standard description of quantum physics. Prior to quantum physics, it was thought that
Quantum indeterminacy can be quantitatively characterized by a probability distribution on the set of outcomes of measurements of an observable. The distribution is uniquely determined by the system state, and moreover quantum mechanics provides a recipe for calculating this probability distribution.
Indeterminacy in measurement was not an innovation of quantum mechanics, since it had been established early on by experimentalists that errors in measurement may lead to indeterminate outcomes. By the later half of the 18th century, measurement errors were well understood, and it was known that they could either be reduced by better equipment or accounted for by statistical error models. In quantum mechanics, however, indeterminacy is of a much more fundamental nature, having nothing to do with errors or disturbance.
An adequate account of quantum indeterminacy requires a theory of measurement. Many theories have been proposed since the beginning of quantum mechanics and quantum measurement continues to be an active research area in both theoretical and experimental physics. Possibly the first systematic attempt at a mathematical theory was developed by John von Neumann. The kinds of measurements he investigated are now called projective measurements. That theory was based in turn on the theory of projection-valued measures for self-adjoint operators which had been recently developed (by von Neumann and independently by Marshall Stone) and the Hilbert space formulation of quantum mechanics (attributed by von Neumann to Paul Dirac).
In this formulation, the state of a physical system corresponds to a vector of length 1 in a Hilbert space H over the complex numbers. An observable is represented by a self-adjoint (i.e. Hermitian) operator A on H.
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