ABSTRACT
Instruments are necessarily of macroscopic size because our sense organs—which can be considered as instruments occupying a certain rank in the von Neumann hierarchy—are of macroscopic size. It is only natural, therefore, that physicists should have attempted to make use of this property for constructing quantum measurement theories. Moreover, one of the remarkable properties possessed by most macroscopic systems, including all instruments, but lacking in microscopic systems is irreversibility. This simple observation suggests very strongly that the phenomenon of irreversibility and the phenomenon of "wave packet reduction," which is associated in some way or other with the measurement process, should somehow be correlated. The theories in the chapter show that it is in practice always possible to attribute definite macroscopic properties to the measuring instruments. The danger that the error we thus make will ever be detected has been proved to be vanishingly small.
