Copenhagen Interpretation - Nature of Collapse

Nature of Collapse

All versions of the Copenhagen interpretation include at least a formal or methodological version of wave function collapse, in which unobserved eigenvalues are removed from further consideration. (In other words, Copenhagenists have always made the assumption of collapse, even in the early days of quantum physics, in the way that adherents of the Many-worlds interpretation have not.) In more prosaic terms, those who hold to the Copenhagen understanding are willing to say that a wave function involves the various probabilities that a given event will proceed to certain different outcomes. But when one or another of those more- or less-likely outcomes becomes manifest the other probabilities cease to have any function in the real world. So if an electron passes through a double slit apparatus there are various probabilities for where on the detection screen that individual electron will hit. But once it has hit, there is no longer any probability whatsoever that it will hit somewhere else. Many-worlds interpretations say that an electron hits wherever there is a possibility that it might hit, and that each of these hits occurs in a separate universe.

An adherent of the subjective view, that the wave function represents nothing but knowledge, would take an equally subjective view of "collapse".

Some argue that the concept of the collapse of a "real" wave function was introduced by Heisenberg and later developed by John Von Neumann in 1932. Heisenberg never used the term collapse, preferring to speak of the wavefunction representing our knowledge of a system, and collapse as the "jumping" of the wavefunction to a new state, representing a "jump" in our knowledge which occurs once a particular phenomenon is registered by the experimenter (i.e. when an observation takes place).