Saturday, January 23, 2021

The Copenhagen School

     "But everything that Bohr and his circle [(the Copenhagen School so imperiously)] believed about these matters turns out to have been wrong.  Everything that they declared to be impossible has actually been accomplished."

     David Z. Albert, Frederick E. Woodbridge Professor of Philosophy at Columbia University, "Quantum's leaping lizards," a review of What is real?  The unfinished quest for the meaning of quantum physics, by Adam Becker, The New York review of books 65, no. 7 (April 19, 2018):  56 (55-57).  See this article, on file under Quantum physics, for the implications, among them that "Each of ['a number of promising theories of what things are "actually like" in the interiors of atoms'] entails that the world is very different from anything that we had imagined before, but what's important for our purposes is that each of them offers us some realistic and comprehensive account of how nature actually is, whether anybody happens to be looking at it or not.  None of these theories requires that we draw any line or make any distinctions, between whatever is being measured and whatever is doing the measuring" (56), etc.  "One of the upshots of the story that Becker tells [(namely, the story that Einstein was 'flawed', 'proud and stubborn', unprepared 'to followed where that new science led', unprepared 'to believe that nature might refuse to accomodate itself to his intutions')] is that this is all nonsense.  Einstein was out of step with his fellow physicists for the simple reason that he thought more clearly and spoke more honestly than they did" (57).

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