Conservation in Every Quantum Measurement Outcome?
Abstract
In quantum mechanics, conservation laws are usually understood only statistically and only in the context of unitary evolution: during such evolution, if an observable commutes with the Hamiltonian, its expectation value and Born-rule probability distribution remain unchanged. Individual measurement outcomes, however, disrupt even this weak form of statistical conservation. Recently, though, it has been argued that a stronger, non-statistical form of conservation, valid at the level of individual measurement outcomes, can be recovered. The proposal relies on the claim that any superposition of eigenstates of a conserved quantity must ultimately be prepared relative to another physical system, which serves as the relevant reference frame and remains correlated with the system being prepared. On this enlarged description, the change observed in the measured system is claimed to be exactly compensated by an opposite change in the preparer, thereby restoring conservation at the level of individual measurement outcomes. We analyze this proposal and argue that it faces significant conceptual difficulties. We show that the proposed mechanism is not adequately justified and, moreover, does not establish conservation in individual measurement outcomes as claimed.
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BibTeX
@misc{okon2026conservation,
title = {{Conservation in Every Quantum Measurement Outcome?}},
author = {E. Okon and D. Sudarsky and M. Wiedemann},
howpublished = {arXiv},
year = {2026},
month = oct,
doi = {10.48550/arxiv.2610.29804},
eprint = {2610.29804},
archivePrefix = {arXiv},
url = {https://arxiv.org/abs/2610.29804},
note = {CC BY 4.0},
}
RIS
TY - UNPB
TI - Conservation in Every Quantum Measurement Outcome?
AU - E. Okon
AU - D. Sudarsky
AU - M. Wiedemann
PY - 2026
DA - 2026/10/21
PB - arXiv
DO - 10.48550/arxiv.2610.29804
UR - https://arxiv.org/abs/2610.29804
AB - In quantum mechanics, conservation laws are usually understood only statistically and only in the context of unitary evolution: during such evolution, if an observable commutes with the Hamiltonian, its expectation value and Born-rule probability distribution remain unchanged. Individual measurement outcomes, however, disrupt even this weak form of statistical conservation. Recently, though, it has been argued that a stronger, non-statistical form of conservation, valid at the level of individual measurement outcomes, can be recovered. The proposal relies on the claim that any superposition of eigenstates of a conserved quantity must ultimately be prepared relative to another physical system, which serves as the relevant reference frame and remains correlated with the system being prepared. On this enlarged description, the change observed in the measured system is claimed to be exactly compensated by an opposite change in the preparer, thereby restoring conservation at the level of individual measurement outcomes. We analyze this proposal and argue that it faces significant conceptual difficulties. We show that the proposed mechanism is not adequately justified and, moreover, does not establish conservation in individual measurement outcomes as claimed.
ER -