Stephen Tashi
Science Advisor
- 6,859
- 1,160
Ok.Well, you can quantify information in terms of the number of bits necessary to specify a situation, but I was just using it in the informal sense.
I don't understand whether the question in thread title can be formulated precisely - or whether any of the replies assume a particular formulation.
Suppose you don't perform the measurement. If you try to retrodict what the superposition was ten years ago, how do you know that the current superposition wasn't a result of some intervening measurements?But if an electron is initially in a superposition of two states, and then I perform a measurement, there is (as far as anybody knows) no way, even theoretically, to retrodict what the initial superposition was.