Apparent Wave Function Collapse Caused by Scattering

Some experimental implications of the recent progress on wave function collapse are calculated. Exact results are derived for the center-of-mass wave function collapse caused by random scatterings and applied to a range of speciic examples. The results show that recently proposed experiments to measure the GRW eeect are likely to fail, since the eeect of naturally occurring scatterings is of the same form as the GRW eeect but generally much stronger. The same goes for attempts to measure the collapse caused by quantum gravity as suggested by Hawking and others. The results also indicate that macroscopic systems tend to be found in states with xp = h= p 2, but microscopic systems in highly tiltedly squeezed states with xp h.