Piero Scaruffi

These are excerpts and elaborations from my book "The Nature of Consciousness"

The Measurement Problem  In a 1926 conversation with Heisenberg, Einstein pointed out that measurement is a physical process itself and cannot be abstracted from the physical theory that requires it (as it was assumed in classical Physics). It is the theory that decides what the physicist can observe. A measurement is a lengthy and complex process that leads from the quantity that is measured to the various elements of the measuring apparatus to the observer. One must have a theory of what happens to the “measured” quantity throughout this path. In order to measure a property of a system via a certain apparatus, one must know the correct laws governing the interaction between the system and the apparatus. When a physicist observes a new phenomenon, s/he is forced to use the old theory (because a new theory of the new phenomenon does not exist yet) but this distorts the measurement. Einstein basically warned Heisenberg that Quantum Physics needed a new way of performing measurements that could not be the same as that of classical Physics.   Back to the beginning of the chapter "The New Physics" | Back to the index of all chapters