2025/12/08 by Adlam, Emily
#FOS: Physical sciences #History and Philosophy of Physics (physics.hist-ph) #Quantum Physics (quant-ph)
paper · doi:10.48550/arxiv.2512.07101
This article suggests that thinking about the role of reference frames can provide new insight into Extended Wigner's Friend scenarios. This involves appealing to symmetries to make a principled distinction between properties of a system which are meaningful only relative to an external reference system and properties which are meaningful without further relativization. Thus we may propose that there are always well-defined facts about what observers have observed, but there are not necessarily well-defined facts about the relations between their reference frames, so there will not always exist a joint distribution over their outcomes which can meaningfully be compared to the predictions of quantum mechanics. In addition, this approach also offers a general argument against the idea that there should be a regress of relativization.