Subject, object, and measurement
pp. 691-696
in: Jagdish Mehra (ed), The physicist's conception of nature, Berlin, Springer, 1973Abstract
The laws of quantum physics are formulated in terms of predictions for the outcome of experiments. Traditionally in physics the motivation for the performance of experiments was the desire to learn about the "outside world", i.e. the world abstracted from the presence of conscious, thinking and planning beings. One may ask first whether quantum physics teaches us that such an abstraction is grossly illegitimate. If the answer is no1,2 then we may ask further: what can we learn from the laws of quantum physics about the properties of this outside world? Specifically we may ask which concepts can be used, which attributes can be assigned to describe the outside world? We shall call such attributes "real" or "objective" quantities.