A comment on the paper "How can a Result of a Single Coin Toss Turn Out to be 100 Heads" by C. Ferrie and J. Combes

2014/10/02 by D. Sokolovski, Sokolovski, D.
Physics and Astronomy · #FOS: Physical sciences #Quantum Mechanics and Applications #Quantum Physics (quant-ph) #Statistical Mechanics and Entropy #quant-ph

paper · pdf · doi:10.48550/arxiv.1410.0570

3 pages, no figures

openalex publication_date 2014/10/02 · arxiv created 2014/10/16 · arxiv updated 2014/10/17 · openalex created_date 2016/06/24 · openalex updated_date 2026/07/28

Abstract

The authors of a recent paper [Phys. Rev. Lett. 113, 120404 (2014)] suggest that "weak values are not inherently quantum but rather a purely statistical feature of pre- and postselection with disturbance". We argue that this claim is erroneous, since such values require averaging with distributions which change sign. This type of averaging arises naturally in quantum mechanics, but may not occur in classical statistics.

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