  We examine the entanglement and state disturbance arising in a protective
measurement and argue that these inescapable effects doom the claim that
protective measurement establishes the reality of the wave function. An
additional challenge to this claim results from the exponential number of
protective measurements required to reconstruct multi-qubit states. We suggest
that the failure of protective measurement to settle the question of the
meaning of the wave function is entirely expected, for protective measurement
is but an application of the standard quantum formalism, and none of the hard
foundational questions can ever be settled in this way.
