by minkwe » Tue Apr 18, 2017 8:27 am
You are quite right Fred. The authors use "The system" sloppily. In fact, most authors use the phrase sloppily to their own undoing.
"The attempt to conceive the quantum-theoretical description as the complete description of the individual systems leads to unnatural theoretical interpretations, which become immediately unnecessary if one accepts the interpretation that the description refers to ensembles of systems and not to individual systems."
- Albert Einstein
To spot the flaw in most theoretical physics papers, focus on the phrase "the system", and ask "which one?".