Wigner's friend and continuous time evolution of the state of a closed system and the probabilistic, discontinuous collapse of the state of a system upon measurement. Wigner's friend is therefore directly linked to the measurement problem in quantum mechanics with its famous Schrödinger's cat paradox. The thought experiment posits a friend of Wigner in a laboratory and lets him perform a quantum measurement on a physical system (this could be a spin system or also Schrödinger's cat). This system is assumed to be in a superposition of two distinct states, say, state 0 and state 1 (or "dead" and "alive", in the
Expectation value (quantum mechanics) Expectation value (quantum mechanics) In quantum mechanics, the expectation value is the probabilistic expected value of the result (measurement) of an experiment. It can be thought of as an average of all the possible outcomes of a measurement as weighted by their likelihood, and as such it is not the "most" probable value of a measurement; indeed the expectation value may have zero probability of occurring (e.g. measurements which can only yield integer values may have a non-integer mean). It is a fundamental concept in all areas of quantum physics. Consider an operator formula_1. The expectation value is then formula_2