# References

Is the Statistical Interpretation of Quantum Mechanics   
Implied by the Correspondence Principle ?

Kurt Gottfried<sup>1</sup><sup>1</sup>1 Presented at the conference “Epistemological and Experimental Perspectives on Quantum Physics,” Vienna, September 3-6, 1998; to appear in 7th. Yearbook, Institute Vienna Circle, D. Greenberger, W.L. Reiter and A. Zeilinger (eds.), Kluwer: Dordrecht 1999.   
Laboratory for Nuclear Studies, Cornell University, Ithaca NY 14853   
November 29, 1998

Our impresarion, Anton Zeilinger, ignored my pleas of ignorance and prevailed on me to talk about my discussions with John Bell about the foundations of quantum mechanics. This ‘debate’ was aborted by John’s tragic death shortly after we last met at a wonderful workshop in Amherst attended by several people in this audience. At that time, John’s last paper “Against Measurement” was about to be published. It featured a wonderfully barbed attack on the treatment of measurement in my 1966 textbook. I was delighted that the most profound student of quantum mechanics since the Founding Fathers, and an old friend from CERN, had paid close attention to what I had written, because with but one exception,  no one publishing in the field had ever mentioned my work even when espousing a position that I had taken long before.

John would not have changed his views had he been able to hear my response at the CERN memorial symposium. Furthermore, I was far from satisfied with what I published back then. On the other hand, I continue to find John’s critique of orthodoxy to be rather less overwhelming than his superb rhetoric. Nevertheless, what I will say was stimulated by reflecting on the views John espoused in our last conversations and in his last paper.

I

In large part, the interpretation of quantum mechanics is so controversial because the basic equations of the theory seem not to say what they mean in terms of pre-existing concepts. In retrospect, the successful developments of physics followed a clear path from the Principia until it disappeared into a fog in 1925. Whatever Thomas Kuhn and his disciples may say, before the advent of quantum mechanics physics had ultimately proven to be a cumulative pursuit, with new knowledge built on prior concepts.

Newton’s equations of motion defined all its new concepts in terms of then accepted conceptions of space and time. The next giant steps concerned heat and electromagnetism. Statistical mechanics, while full of subtleties, nevertheless demonstrated how thermodynamics could be related to an underlying Newtonian description. In electrodynamics, the meaning of the new concept, the electromagnetic field, is defined by Maxwell’s equations and the Lorentz force law by means of Newton’s equations. Admitedly, special relativity introduced a new conception of space and time, but their meaning was defined by a more penetrating examination of pre-existing concepts using familiar tools: measuring rods and clocks. General relativity, while profoundly new, is, if you pardon the expression, trivial, provided you are freely falling and short-sighted. Furthermore, Einstein’s equations tell you that – you do not need him whispering in your ear.

Quantum mechanics does not fit this pattern, it would appear. On its own, the formalism does not seem to disclose what the wave function means, and gurus such as Born, Bohr and Heisenberg were needed to translate the equations into our language. I acknowledged this in my response to John:

> If one were to hand the Schrödinger equation to Maxwell, and tell him that it describes the structure of matter in terms of various point particles whose masses and charges are to be seen in the equation, this knowledge would not, by itself, enable Maxwell to figure out what is meant by the wave function. Eventually he would need help: “Oh, I forgot to tell you that according to Rabbi Born, a great thinker in the yeshiva that flourished in Göttingen in the early part of the 20th century, $`|\mathrm{\Psi }(𝒓_1,\mathrm{},t)|^2`$ is …”

My aim is to explore whether the situation is really this bleak – to ask to what extent, if any, the statistical interpretation of quantum mechanics is revealed by the theory’s formalism. I make no claim to having a fully satisfactory answer to this question. What I have to say is really the reading of an old book from the back towards the front.

I now put myself into the shoes of this fictional Maxwell. The task of fathoming the physical content of the Schrödinger equation leads me to adopt the following assumptions and ground rules:

* The mathematical formalism of orthodox quantum mechanics provides a complete and consistent description of Nature as it stands. The implications of the formalism, such as the superposition principle, are not to be tampered with.
* It is not permissible to invoke the statistical interpretation, the collapse of the wave function, or the influence of some dynamical environment. 
* If quantum mechanics is indeed complete, there must exist conditions under which classical mechanics provides an essentially exact approximation to quantum mechanics for systems having properties that are defined by this very limit.

The goal is to examine the classical limit of the quantum mechanical formalism to learn the extent to which this limit compels the statistical interpretation. If such a link could be established it would continue the tradition of connecting new developments in physics to the conceptual roots of the discipline.

I will present an argument which claims that the Schrödinger equation, when examined in the classical limit, leads to the statistical interpretation for degrees of freedom described by finite-dimensional Hilbert spaces having no classical counterpart. In contrast, the argument, as it stands here, does not lead to the statistical interpretation for the degrees of freedom that have a classical counterpart.

Incidentally, my title is purposely close to that of a remarkable paper by Van Vleck written 70 years ago, “The Correspondence Principle in the Statistical Interpretation of Quantum Mechanics,” which had a somewhat similar goal. So I am singing for my supper from an old though unfinished score.

II

Schrödinger’s very first equation in his first paper on wave mechanics is the classical Hamilton-Jacobi equation; then he made the great leap to his wave equation. Is there a return path?

The first step is to note that the Schrödinger equation implies that in the naive classical limit $`\mathrm{}0`$, the wave function $`\mathrm{\Psi }`$ has an essential singularity, which then motivates the WKB Ansatz

$$\mathrm{\Psi }=e^{i\mathrm{\Theta }(𝒒,t)/\mathrm{}},\mathrm{\Theta }=S+\frac{\mathrm{}}{i}U+O(\mathrm{}^2),$$
(1)   
where $`𝒒(𝒒_1,\mathrm{},𝒒_N)`$ is a point in the configuration space $``$ of an $`N`$ particle system. At this first stage, I ignore “internal” variables, such as spin, inhabiting finite dimensional Hilbert spaces with no classical counterpart.

The Schrödinger’s equation then produces the following familiar facts:

1. Ansatz (1) is only legitimate – only produces a respectable asymptotic series, if

$$\frac{|\mathrm{\Theta }/𝒒_k|^2}{|^2\mathrm{\Theta }/𝒒_l^2|}\mathrm{};$$
(2)   
when this condition is violated the approximation (1) is not valid, and the Schrödinger equation itself must be used.
2. The leading term $`S`$ satisfies the classical Hamilton-Jacobi equation in the region accessible to classical motion. Recall that the classical trajectories are the curves in $``$ everywhere normal to the surfaces of constant $`S`$. Thus $`\mathrm{\Psi }`$ is related not to one classical trajectory, but to a family or set of such trajectories, $`\{𝒒(t)\}`$.
3. The next order term $`U`$ is related to $`S`$ by

$$\frac{U}{t}+\underset{k=1}{\overset{N}{}}\frac{1}{2m_k}\left(\frac{^2S}{𝒒_k^2}+2\frac{S}{𝒒_k}\mathbf{}\frac{U}{𝒒_k}\right)=0.$$
(3)   
Thus $`U`$, which is the $`\mathrm{}`$-independent factor in $`\mathrm{\Psi },`$ is real in the classically accessible regions, and therefore

$$w(𝒒,t)\mathrm{exp}[2U(𝒒,t)]=\underset{\mathrm{}0}{lim}|\mathrm{\Psi }|^2.$$
(4)   
When rephrased in terms of $`w`$, (3) becomes a classical continuity equation in $``$:

$$\frac{w}{t}+\underset{k}{}\frac{}{𝒒_k}(w\dot{𝒒}_k)=0,$$
(5)   
where $`\dot{𝒒}_k`$ is the velocity at time $`t`$ of the $`k^{\mathrm{th}}`$ particle as determined by the classical equations of motion. Thus $`w`$ plays the role of a density and $`w\dot{𝒒}`$ that of a 3$`N`$ dimensional current vector in $``$; i.e., Eq. 5 is the $`\mathrm{}0`$ limit of the Schrödinger continuity equation.
4. The quantity $`w(𝒒,t)`$, apart from an overall arbitrary constant, is Van Vleck’s determinant $`D`$, a purely classical quantity (involving derivatives of $`S`$). For a given $`|\mathrm{\Psi }|^2`$, $`D`$ determines how the trajectories that form the set $`\{𝒒(t)\}`$ are “populated.”

In short, in the classical limit the Schrödinger equation does not describe a single system, but a population of replicas of such a system moving along the trajectories $`\{𝒒(t)\}`$. As $`\mathrm{\Psi }`$ depends only on the degrees of freedom of a single system, and because experiments can be done on individual systems, this population is to be be visualized as a set of identical specimens which, one at a time, follow one or another of the allowed classical trajectories $`\{𝒒(t)\}`$, and which, in retrospect, produced a population of these trajectories as specified by $`w(𝒒,t).`$

For any specific solution $`\mathrm{\Psi }`$ of a specific Schrödinger equation, that is all that can be said about the the trajectories and their population. To have better knowledge of which trajectories are being followed given this $`\mathrm{\Psi }`$, one must intervene by changing the Hamiltonian in the Schrödinger equation, e.g., with a potential that does not allow trajectories to proceed unless they pass through an aperture of dimension $`a`$ with edges smooth enough to leave the WKB approximation valid. Thereafter, the trajectories and their population will change; i.e., $`\mathrm{\Psi }`$ will change.

The preceding discussion does not purport to be a derivation of the Born interpretation of $`\mathrm{\Psi }(𝒒,t)`$. To avert such a misperception, I have used the word “population” instead of probability. Furthermore, the classical description of what can be extracted from $`\mathrm{\Psi }`$ is only valid as long as the inequality (2) is satified, i.e., if the system is sufficiently heavy, the forces sufficiently smooth, and the time interval over which the semiclassical description is needed is sufficiently short. The Born interpretation has no such restrictions, quite aside from the profound difference between quantum mechanical probabilities and probability distributions for a population of identical systems obeying the laws of classical mechanics.

The restrictions imposed by the semiclassical approximation do not emasculate the argument being made here. For the purpose at hand, it suffices that systems exist that, on the one hand, have properties which allow some of their degrees of freedom to be described semiclassically under appropriate circumstances, and on the other, have inherently nonclassical degrees of freedom that must be treated in strict accordance with the laws of quantum mechanics.

III

Consider, then, such a system. The degrees of freedom with a classical counterpart will be the position $`𝒒`$ in a configuration space $``$, while the degrees of freedom with no such counterpart live in a finite dimensional “internal” Hilbert space $``$.

I should explain that the rules of my game allowed the fictional Newton to know the physical phenomena of electrodynamics when he was asked to unravel the meaning of the new concepts defined by Maxwell’s equations. In the same spirit, the fictional Maxwell is to know the phenomena that quantum mechanics supposedly accounts for. For example, he would be aware of the Stern-Gerlach experiment, and thus know that if an atomic species has a magnetic moment, this moment only displays a discrete set of orientations, while from the Schrödinger equation he would know that angular momentum is quantized.

In this scenario, therefore, the internal space of the systems of interest, $``$, is spanned by a finite set of states, which without loss of anything essential can be taken to be the spinors $`\chi _\mu (𝒎)`$, where $`𝒎`$ is the direction of the quantization axis and $`\mu =j,j1,\mathrm{},j`$. As in the paradigmatic example of the Stern-Gerlach experiment, the Hamiltonian is assumed to contain a time-independent perturbation $`H_{\mathrm{ext}}(𝒒)`$ which is an operator both in $``$ and $``$, is nonzero only in some bounded region $`_{\mathrm{ext}}`$ of configuration space, and is brought to diagonal form by the basis whose quantization axis is $`𝒏`$.

Let $`\psi _{\mathrm{in}}(𝒒,t)`$ be a wave function that is accurately approximated by the WKB Ansatz, and which, for $`t<t_1`$, describes a set of classical trajectories $`\{𝒒_{\mathrm{in}}(t)\}`$ that form a beam moving towards $`_{\mathrm{ext}}`$, which they enter at $`t=t_1.`$ Furthermore, let $`\chi _\mu (𝒎)`$ be the internal state of this beam, so that the incident state is represented by

$$\mathrm{\Psi }_{\mathrm{in}}(𝒒,t)=\psi _{\mathrm{in}}(𝒒,t)\chi _\mu (𝒎).$$
(6)   
For $`t_1<t<t_2`$ this beam traverses the region $`_{\mathrm{ext}}`$ where the perturbation $`H_{\mathrm{ext}}(𝒒)`$ exists, and provided this is sufficiently smooth, the WKB approximation will continue to be valid. The state (6) is then expanded in the diagonal basis, and for $`t>t_1`$ evolves into

$$\mathrm{\Psi }(𝒒,t)=\underset{\sigma =j}{\overset{j}{}}c_\sigma \psi _\sigma (𝒒,t)\chi _\sigma (𝒏),c_\sigma =(\chi _\sigma ^{}(𝒏),\chi _\mu (𝒎)).$$
(7)   
Each $`\psi _\sigma `$ has a phase which is a solution of a separate Hamilton-Jacobi equation with a potential that depends on the quantum number $`\sigma `$, and describes a set of trajectories $`\{𝒒_\sigma (t)\}`$ that move in distinct directions. Each such set has a density $`w_\sigma (𝒒,t)`$ satisfying a separate continuity equation, which means that

$$𝑑𝒒w_\sigma (𝒒,t)=C_\sigma ,t_1<t<t_2,$$
(8)   
where the constants $`C_\sigma `$ could depend on $`\sigma `$. But $`\psi _\sigma (𝒒,t)\psi _{\mathrm{in}}(𝒒,t_1)`$ as $`tt_1`$ from above, and therefore all the $`C_\sigma `$ are equal:

$$𝑑𝒒w_\sigma (𝒒,t)=𝑑𝒒w_{\mathrm{in}}(𝒒,t)=1,$$
(9)   
where the last equality is just a convention.

By design, the region in which the perturbation $`H_{\mathrm{ext}}`$ acts is large enough to produce beams that are well separated for $`t>t_2`$, so that for such times the density is 

$$w(𝒒,t)=\underset{\sigma }{}|c_\sigma |^2w_\sigma (𝒒,t).$$
(10)   
Because of (10), the fraction of the incident population that ends up in the beam bearing the label $`\sigma `$ is $`|c_\sigma |^2.`$ All but one of these beams, with $`\sigma =\rho `$, can then be eliminated by a another interaction term in $`H`$. This filtered beam can be sent through a second arrangement of the Stern-Gerlach variety with any other orientation $`𝒌`$, which will produce a set of beams with population fractions

$$|(\chi _\rho ^{}(𝒏),\chi _\sigma (𝒌))|^2.$$
(11)   
All the familiar statements about the complex coefficients $`c_\sigma `$ as probability amplitudes emerge, therefore, though thus far only expressed as fractions of various populations that pass through some combination of filters and fields.

This then leads to the question of whether a label $`\mathrm{`}\mathrm{`}\sigma `$ along $`𝒏`$” can be assigned to a specimen following a trajectory in the initial set $`\{𝒒_{\mathrm{in}}(t)\}`$, before it enters the force field that produces the separation into the distinct sets $`\{𝒒_\sigma (t)\}`$. If this could be done, then each member of the population would have an inherent property called $`\sigma `$, which is revealed by the subsequent segregation into the distinct sets $`\{𝒒(t)_\sigma \}`$. But this cannot be done, because the intial internal state $`\chi _\sigma (𝒏)`$ in (6) can be expanded in any of the infinity of bases in $``$, and the appropriate choice is only revealed after the beam has entered the separating field.

> Thus an intrinsic property “$`\sigma `$ along $`𝐧`$” cannot be assigned to individual specimens; all that can be said is that if a specimen passed through the field oriented along $`𝐧`$, the probability that it will emerge in the population “$`\sigma `$” is $`|c_\sigma |^2.`$

This is just the orthodox meaning of probabilities in quantum mechanics: the probability of a specific outcome as revealed by measurement, John Bell notwithstanding.

The same combination of semiclassical and quantum mechanical descriptions can be given for experiments of the Bohm-EPR type – for example, a system at rest that disintegrates in two fragments which then follow opposed classical trajectories $`\{𝒒_1(t)\}`$ and $`\{𝒒_2(t)\}`$, and a suitable correlated state in the joint internal Hilbert space $`_1_2`$. When the widely separated fragments are passed through fields that produce distinct trajectories for the various eigenvalues $`(\sigma _1,\sigma _2)`$ along the directions $`(𝒏_1,𝒏_2),`$ they will produce correlations that violate the Bell inequalities, with all the familiar implications that follow therefrom.

I thank David Mermin for asking several pointed questions.