Bibliographic record
Abstract
Masanes, Galley and Müller \cite{masanes2019measurement} argue that the measurement postulates of non-relativistic quantum mechanics follow from the structural postulates together with an assumption they call the "possibility of state estimation". Their argument also relies on what they term a "theory-independent characterization of measurements for single and multipartite systems". We refute their conclusion, giving explicit examples of non-quantum measurement and state update rules that satisfy all their assumptions. We also show that their "possibility of state estimation" assumption is neither necessary nor sufficient to ensure a sensible notion of state estimation within a theory whose states are described by the quantum formalism. We further show their purportedly "theory-independent" characterization assumes several properties of quantum measurements that exclude plausible alternative types of measurement. We illustrate all these points with specific alternative measurement postulates and post-measurement state update rules. We conclude that, contrary to some folklore, quantum mechanics is by no means an island in theory-space. It can consistently be extended by rules for obtaining information about quantum states other than via POVMs. Whether such rules are realised in nature, for example in linking quantum theory and gravity, is an empirical question that cannot be resolved by theoretical analysis alone.
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How this classification was reachedexpand
Full frame machine prediction
Teacher imitationNot calibrated prevalence, not ground truth. Human validation pending. The Gemma side is a direct model label for every work in the frame, read from the title-only record. The Codex side is a classifier learned from the 10,348 direct Codex labels and calibrated to design-weighted sample rates; fields without enough sample support carry no Codex call. Candidate is the union of the two sides; consensus is their intersection. These outputs are machine_predicted_unvalidated and are not human labels.
Distilled classifier scores by category (both heads)
| Category | Codex | Gemma |
|---|---|---|
| Metaresearch | 0.009 | 0.028 |
| Meta-epidemiology (narrow) | 0.001 | 0.001 |
| Meta-epidemiology (broad) | 0.002 | 0.002 |
| Bibliometrics | 0.001 | 0.002 |
| Science and technology studies | 0.002 | 0.017 |
| Scholarly communication | 0.005 | 0.021 |
| Open science | 0.003 | 0.006 |
| Research integrity | 0.004 | 0.009 |
| Insufficient payload (model declined to judge) | 0.007 | 0.002 |
Machine scores (provisional)
The two teacher heads of the student model, read on this work. A score orders the frame for review; it never asserts a category, and the validation status ships verbatim with every row.
Baseline scores from an immature model (maturity gate not passed, 7 training rounds). Scores rank; they never assert a category.
score_only:v0-immature-baseline · verbatim from the scoring run: score_only means the number may rank works, and no category label ships from itClassification
machine, unvalidatedMachine predicted; a candidate call from one source (direct Gemma or distilled Codex), not a consensus.
How this classification was reached, model by model and score by score, is at the end of the page under "How this classification was reached".