Abstract
Referring to the orthodox denial of the possibility of quantum ontology, John Bell invoked a vivid image: “It is,” he wrote, “as if our friends could not find words to tell us about the very strange places where they went on holiday. We could see for ourselves whether they came back browner or fatter” (Bell 1987a, 171).
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By a “principal axis transformation,” which diagonalized the Hamiltonian matrix, one obtained in principle the matrices for position and momentum. Though astonishingly simple in principle, the procedure was useless, due to the technical difficulties in practice (Beller 1983b).
About the “Copenhagen hegemony” see Cushing (1994), and about the “diffusion of the Copenhagen spirit” Heilbron (1988).
Despite Bohr’s life-long preoccupation with causality, his use of this concept is unsystematic and sometimes contradictory. Bohr had a very “thick” notion of causality: sometimes it is a cause-effect relationship, sometimes it is “determinism,” sometimes it is an epistemological — other times ontological — definition, sometimes causality is equated only with applicability of conservation laws of energy and momenta, other times with simultaneous applicability of both space-time and energy-momenta concepts. Sometimes Bohr’s understanding of causality is a probabilistic one, applying to an individual system, and sometimes, it is a statistical ensemble interpretation. Bohr often conflates determinism and predictability, which are substantially different notions. I will follow in this paper Bohr’s, Heisenberg’s and Bohm’s use of “determinism” and “causality” as interchangeable notions, despite the differences between them. These differences are not important for the issues discussed here.
David Finkelstein’s pointed comment on these lines strikes to the heart of the matter: “This seems like too much protest; if we cannot then the should-not is surely otiose, and if we should not then we probably can” (1987, 291).
In Bohr’s and Heisenberg’s writings, even when the original idea of disturbance is explicitly rejected, its imagery is used implicitly in metaphorical, intuitively appealing allusions.
This example is analyzed in depth in Beller and Fine (1994).
It is instructive to mention here that Bridgman’s original aim of introducing operationalism was to prevent the “embarrassing” need to basically revise physical theories, ensuring their certainty by strict operationalistic definition of concepts (Beller 1988).
If we combine the two bodies of unequal weight, the composite body should fall at a slower rate than the heavy one between the two, because the lighter of the two bodies impedes the fall of the heavier one. It also should fall faster than the heavy body, because its weight is greater than that of each of the two separate bodies. Hence — all bodies, regardless of their weight, must have the same rate of fall.
Many physicists who did not trouble to go into the Bohrian argument in depth had an easier time to follow them uncritically. Heisenberg complained as early as 1930 that physicists have more faith in the Copenhagen interpretation than a clear understanding of it (Heisenberg 1930, preface). According to Bohm himself, “the whole development [of a search for a hidden variables alternative] started in Princeton around 1950, when I had just finished my book Quantum Theory. I had written it from what I regarded Niels Bohr’s point of view…. I had taught a course on quantum theory… and had written the book primarily in order to try to obtain a better understanding of the whole subject. However, after the work was finished, I looked back over what i had done and still felt somewhat dissatisfied” (Bohm 1987, 33 ).
Einstein and Schrödinger were, of course, the most prominent exceptions.
Not surprisingly, von Weizsäcker did not attempt to generalize his conclusion that certain Copenhagen arguments were merely those of consistency, and not of inevitability, to the whole orthodox framework.
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Beller, M. (1996). Bohm and the “Inevitability” of Acausality. In: Cushing, J.T., Fine, A., Goldstein, S. (eds) Bohmian Mechanics and Quantum Theory: An Appraisal. Boston Studies in the Philosophy of Science, vol 184. Springer, Dordrecht. https://doi.org/10.1007/978-94-015-8715-0_15
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