How to protect the interpretation of the wave function against protective measurements

This article (13 pages, 1 figure) is available as a gzipped PostScript file and also from the quant-ph archive in Los Alamos.

A new type of measurement procedures, called protective measurements, has been proposed by Aharonov, Anandan and Vaidman. These authors argue that a protective measurement allows the determination of arbitrary observables of a single quantum system and claim that this favors a realistic interpretation of the quantum state. This paper proves that only observables that commute with the system's Hamiltonian can be measured protectively. It is argued that this restriction saves the coherence of alternative interpretations.