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Well nobody argues the wave function represents our ignorance about the system's state. It's certainly not in the Copenhagen interpretation anyway. The wave fun

• Estragon 17y ago
  In the Copenhagen interpretation, the wave function represents our ignorance of what the system's state will become when observed, but it's taken as an accurate description of the system's actual state prior to observation. That is the point of the "Schroedinger's cat" paradox: that under the Copenhagen interpretation, the cat actually is in a superposition of alive and dead states, until someone looks in the box. Quantum computation crucially depends on the objective reality of this superposition. It seems likely to me that the superposition in the formalism actually just represents our ignorance of the system's state, not the state itself.
  • Herring 17y ago
    > It seems likely to me that the superposition in the formalism actually just represents our ignorance of the system's state, not the state itself. Again, nobody argues that. It's possible to experimentally distinguish between the two situations (Bell's theorem). This is a bit of a strawman. Besides the wave function is a complex vector. It can't represent ignorance. You have to take |ψ|2 to get a real value.