Professor of Physics Emeritus Philip Pearle is the co-author of a paper that was recently published in Physical Review A 112. “Relativistic collapse model with quantized time variables” was written with his British colleague, Daniel Bedingham.
Pearle is the author of a theory – now more than 35 years old – that changes standard quantum theory to resolve the so-called “measurement problem.”
“This [problem] occurs because in a measurement situation, where there are a number of different possible outcomes, quantum theory does not describe an actual outcome of the experiment, but only gives the probabilities of the various outcomes,” Pearle said.
Described in his book Introduction to Dynamical Wave Function Collapse (Oxford University Press, 2024), Pearle’s theory “adds something that fluctuates randomly to the quantum theory evolution equation, the Schrödinger equation, so that depending on the specific random fluctuation, the evolution ends up describing one or another of the outcomes,” he explained.
His theory, however, “does not obey Einstein’s theory of relativity, which describes what happens when experiments are conducted in rapidly (comparable to the speed of light) moving laboratories,” he said, and “is only applicable to laboratories moving at slower speeds.”
In “Relativistic collapse model with quantized time variables,” Pearle and Bedingham extend the theory so that it obeys the theory of relativity.
Posted October 27, 2025
