- #1
JohnBarchak
- 45
- 0
It is clear that a large number of physicists know little about the early development of quantum theory. Many do not attach much importance to that early development, and normally, I would be in that group. But today, our incredible new technologies may allow a very profitable reexamination of the fundamental basis of physics. In the 1920s, the concept of working with single particles was almost unthinkable. So, a statistical basis for physics seemed perfectly rational. And while Bose-Einstein had mathematically explored many particle coherent systems, the gedanken experiment was the only kind of experiment that could actually be done. Today, man is becoming the master of both single systems and many particle coherent systems and the seemingly mystical properties of the world of the very small may actually be subject to very close scrutiny. Maybe, just maybe, we might not need the statistical basis and the mysticism.
The mystical quality of today's physics has a definite root cause and, as I hope to show, that root cause has almost nothing to do with Nature. Neils Bohr loved playing the role of sorcerer - I suspect that he had a lot of fun with his presentations. What astounds me is that several generations of physicists have taken on the role of sorcerer's apprentice. Physics has been turned into a poparie of mystical qualities attributed to nature. In his defense, Bohr tried many times to stop the attribution of the features of QM to Nature such as when he stated: "There is no quantum world. There is only
an abstract quantum physical description. It is wrong to think that the task of physics is to find out how nature *is*. Physics concerns what we can say about nature." [J. C. Polkinghorne (1989), The Quantum World, Princeton University Press.]
The fact is that QM has almost nothing to do with Nature or reality. All of the weirdness is in QM, not Nature -- Bohr's injection of his Copenhagen Program into QM is the perfect example of Garbage In - Garbage Out. In 1909 (spring), Max Planck, as a foreign lecturer, delivered a series of eight lectures titled "The Present System of Theoretical Physics" at Columbia University. In the first lecture, Planck expressed his greatest fear:
"To sum up, we may say that the characteristic feature of the actual development of the system of theoretical physics is an ever extending emancipation from the anthropomorphic elements, which has for its object the most complete separation possible of the system of physics and the individual personality of the physicist. One may call this the objectiveness of the system of physics. In order to exclude the possibility of any misunderstanding, I wish to emphasize particularly that we have here to do, not with an absolute separation of physics from the physicist--for a physics without the physicist is unthinkable,--but with the elimination of the individuality of the particular physicist and therefore with the production of a common system of physics for all physicists."
Up until the inception of "the collapse of the wave function", the earth-centric universe was the most obvious example of an anthropomorphic concept. Today, "the collapse of the wave function" is easily the the most anthropomorphic concept ever devised by man. Read Ed Jaynes work for many more examples of anthropomorphic concepts in QM. It appears that Planck's greatest fears have been fully realized in QM.
The following is from Davis Wick's "The Infamous Boundary":
"The final topic of this chapter concerns Bohr's philosophical agenda not derived from physics. The extent to which Bohr based his views on psychological theories popular in his day is not generally known to physicists; when they hear of it they usually react with disbelief. The naive realist -- who is frequently accused of harboring a philosophical prejudice -- is well advised to learn a few of these facts for purposes of self defense.
There seems to be a reference to psychology in every exposition Bohr wrote on complementarity. In the post-Como paper, Bohr wrote 'The idea of complementarity is suited to characterize the situation, which bears a profound analogy to the general difficulty in the formulation of ideas, inherent in the distinction between subject and object.' In a paper of 1929, he remarked that 'the necessity of taking recourse to a complementarity, or reciprocal, mode of description is perhaps familiar to us from psychological problems.' Later in the same paper there appears the following passage:
_______________________________________________
In particular, the apparent contrast between the
continuous onward flow of associative thinking
and the preservation of the unity of personality
exhibits a suggestive analogy with the relation
between the wave description of the motions of
material particles...and their indestructible
individuality.
_______________________________________________
Max Jammer made a credible case in 1974 that this peculiar passage is a direct paraphrase of one in 'Principles of Psychology' (1890), by the American psychologist William James (the brother of the novelist Henry James).
William James (1842-1910), who in turn taught physiology, psychology, and philosophy at Harvard, was America's most influential thinker at the turn of the century. His Pragmatism and Radical Empiricism are still widely discussed today. In a chapter titled "The Stream of Thought," James compares conciousness to the flight of a bird: a journey alternating between flights and perchings. The "perchings" represent resting places occupied by sense impressions, and the "flights" are thoughts, which form relations between the impressions.
James suggests the virtual impossibility of contemplating such a "flight" at the moment that it occurs: "As a snowflake crystal caught in the warm hand is no longer a crystal but a drop, so, instead of catching the feeling of relation moving to its term," we arrive instead at a resting place. "The attempt at introspective analysis in these cases is...like seizing a spinning top to catch its motion, or trying to turn up a gas quickly enough to see how darkness looks."
The similarity to Bohr's language is apparent, but Jammer further suggests that Bohr's coinage of the term "complementarity" may be traced to James. (I have always thought it suggestive that Bohr adopted a neologism, "complementarity," rather than the available term "duality," which he avoided. Perhaps he reasoned that the "duality principle" would be harder to sell to physicists, with their fondness for unifying everything.) James discussed an experiment performed by Pierre Janet, a psychologist and neurologist studying hysterical disease at the same time as Freud. (They were pupils of the same teacher, the physician Charcot.) Janet hypnotized a patient a patient named Lucie, covered her lap with cards, each bearing a number, and then instructed her that she could not see the cards whose numbers were multiples of three. Upon awakening from the trance, Lucie denied that there were any cards labeled 6,9,etc., in her lap, but her hand, while she was otherwise engaged in
conversation, picked up just those cards that bore multiples of three on their faces. James concluded thay "in certain persons the total possible consciousness may be split into parts which coexist but ignore each other, and share the objects of knowledge between them. More remarkable still, they are *complementary*." James even refers to these cases as representing "relations of mutual exclusion" a few pages later. Jammer's case is convincing.
To criticize a scientist for drawing inspiration from another discipline would be anti-intellectual and mean spirited. But a distinction can be made here. When Charles Darwin imported Thomas Malthus's concept of an endless "struggle for existence" from political thought into biology, transforming it into the "survival of the fittest," he was *borrowing a mechanism* and not adopting a new methodology or epistemology. The creative muse visits so rarely that one welcomes any source of inspiration, from art, music, another science, or even one's dreams-- if it helps to uncover *an unknown mechanism*. But if James's musings on the paradoxes of the mind contemplating itself did inspire Bohr, it was not to make a new model of atoms. Instead, Bohr tried to convince physicists they should learn to think that way. Which raises the question of whether James' ideas proved useful to psychologists. The small sample to which I read the quotations above were visibly annoyed at James' paradoxical remarks.
There is overwhelming evidence that Bohr was pursuing a philosophical agenda dating from long before quantum mechanics and having little to do with physics. One more selection, this time from a memoir of Heisenberg, should clinch the case. Remembering a sailing trip with colleagues, including a chemist and a surgeon, in which Bohr waxed eloquent on his new interpretation of quantum theory, Heisenberg wrote:
'Bohr began by talking of the difficulties of language, of the limitations of all our means of expressing ourselves, which one had to take into account from the very beginning if one wants to practice science, and... how satisfying it was that this limitation had already been expressed in the foundations of atomic theory in a mathematically lucid way. Finally, one of the friends remarked drily, "But, Niels, this is not really new, you said exactly the same [thing] ten years ago.'
Bohr's philosophy of complementarity is a dualistic doctrine derived from contemplating mentalistic and linguistic paradoxes. Its supporters made unhelpful and occasionally foolish remarks about biology--and, one suspects, about physics as well."
All the best
John B.
The mystical quality of today's physics has a definite root cause and, as I hope to show, that root cause has almost nothing to do with Nature. Neils Bohr loved playing the role of sorcerer - I suspect that he had a lot of fun with his presentations. What astounds me is that several generations of physicists have taken on the role of sorcerer's apprentice. Physics has been turned into a poparie of mystical qualities attributed to nature. In his defense, Bohr tried many times to stop the attribution of the features of QM to Nature such as when he stated: "There is no quantum world. There is only
an abstract quantum physical description. It is wrong to think that the task of physics is to find out how nature *is*. Physics concerns what we can say about nature." [J. C. Polkinghorne (1989), The Quantum World, Princeton University Press.]
The fact is that QM has almost nothing to do with Nature or reality. All of the weirdness is in QM, not Nature -- Bohr's injection of his Copenhagen Program into QM is the perfect example of Garbage In - Garbage Out. In 1909 (spring), Max Planck, as a foreign lecturer, delivered a series of eight lectures titled "The Present System of Theoretical Physics" at Columbia University. In the first lecture, Planck expressed his greatest fear:
"To sum up, we may say that the characteristic feature of the actual development of the system of theoretical physics is an ever extending emancipation from the anthropomorphic elements, which has for its object the most complete separation possible of the system of physics and the individual personality of the physicist. One may call this the objectiveness of the system of physics. In order to exclude the possibility of any misunderstanding, I wish to emphasize particularly that we have here to do, not with an absolute separation of physics from the physicist--for a physics without the physicist is unthinkable,--but with the elimination of the individuality of the particular physicist and therefore with the production of a common system of physics for all physicists."
Up until the inception of "the collapse of the wave function", the earth-centric universe was the most obvious example of an anthropomorphic concept. Today, "the collapse of the wave function" is easily the the most anthropomorphic concept ever devised by man. Read Ed Jaynes work for many more examples of anthropomorphic concepts in QM. It appears that Planck's greatest fears have been fully realized in QM.
The following is from Davis Wick's "The Infamous Boundary":
"The final topic of this chapter concerns Bohr's philosophical agenda not derived from physics. The extent to which Bohr based his views on psychological theories popular in his day is not generally known to physicists; when they hear of it they usually react with disbelief. The naive realist -- who is frequently accused of harboring a philosophical prejudice -- is well advised to learn a few of these facts for purposes of self defense.
There seems to be a reference to psychology in every exposition Bohr wrote on complementarity. In the post-Como paper, Bohr wrote 'The idea of complementarity is suited to characterize the situation, which bears a profound analogy to the general difficulty in the formulation of ideas, inherent in the distinction between subject and object.' In a paper of 1929, he remarked that 'the necessity of taking recourse to a complementarity, or reciprocal, mode of description is perhaps familiar to us from psychological problems.' Later in the same paper there appears the following passage:
_______________________________________________
In particular, the apparent contrast between the
continuous onward flow of associative thinking
and the preservation of the unity of personality
exhibits a suggestive analogy with the relation
between the wave description of the motions of
material particles...and their indestructible
individuality.
_______________________________________________
Max Jammer made a credible case in 1974 that this peculiar passage is a direct paraphrase of one in 'Principles of Psychology' (1890), by the American psychologist William James (the brother of the novelist Henry James).
William James (1842-1910), who in turn taught physiology, psychology, and philosophy at Harvard, was America's most influential thinker at the turn of the century. His Pragmatism and Radical Empiricism are still widely discussed today. In a chapter titled "The Stream of Thought," James compares conciousness to the flight of a bird: a journey alternating between flights and perchings. The "perchings" represent resting places occupied by sense impressions, and the "flights" are thoughts, which form relations between the impressions.
James suggests the virtual impossibility of contemplating such a "flight" at the moment that it occurs: "As a snowflake crystal caught in the warm hand is no longer a crystal but a drop, so, instead of catching the feeling of relation moving to its term," we arrive instead at a resting place. "The attempt at introspective analysis in these cases is...like seizing a spinning top to catch its motion, or trying to turn up a gas quickly enough to see how darkness looks."
The similarity to Bohr's language is apparent, but Jammer further suggests that Bohr's coinage of the term "complementarity" may be traced to James. (I have always thought it suggestive that Bohr adopted a neologism, "complementarity," rather than the available term "duality," which he avoided. Perhaps he reasoned that the "duality principle" would be harder to sell to physicists, with their fondness for unifying everything.) James discussed an experiment performed by Pierre Janet, a psychologist and neurologist studying hysterical disease at the same time as Freud. (They were pupils of the same teacher, the physician Charcot.) Janet hypnotized a patient a patient named Lucie, covered her lap with cards, each bearing a number, and then instructed her that she could not see the cards whose numbers were multiples of three. Upon awakening from the trance, Lucie denied that there were any cards labeled 6,9,etc., in her lap, but her hand, while she was otherwise engaged in
conversation, picked up just those cards that bore multiples of three on their faces. James concluded thay "in certain persons the total possible consciousness may be split into parts which coexist but ignore each other, and share the objects of knowledge between them. More remarkable still, they are *complementary*." James even refers to these cases as representing "relations of mutual exclusion" a few pages later. Jammer's case is convincing.
To criticize a scientist for drawing inspiration from another discipline would be anti-intellectual and mean spirited. But a distinction can be made here. When Charles Darwin imported Thomas Malthus's concept of an endless "struggle for existence" from political thought into biology, transforming it into the "survival of the fittest," he was *borrowing a mechanism* and not adopting a new methodology or epistemology. The creative muse visits so rarely that one welcomes any source of inspiration, from art, music, another science, or even one's dreams-- if it helps to uncover *an unknown mechanism*. But if James's musings on the paradoxes of the mind contemplating itself did inspire Bohr, it was not to make a new model of atoms. Instead, Bohr tried to convince physicists they should learn to think that way. Which raises the question of whether James' ideas proved useful to psychologists. The small sample to which I read the quotations above were visibly annoyed at James' paradoxical remarks.
There is overwhelming evidence that Bohr was pursuing a philosophical agenda dating from long before quantum mechanics and having little to do with physics. One more selection, this time from a memoir of Heisenberg, should clinch the case. Remembering a sailing trip with colleagues, including a chemist and a surgeon, in which Bohr waxed eloquent on his new interpretation of quantum theory, Heisenberg wrote:
'Bohr began by talking of the difficulties of language, of the limitations of all our means of expressing ourselves, which one had to take into account from the very beginning if one wants to practice science, and... how satisfying it was that this limitation had already been expressed in the foundations of atomic theory in a mathematically lucid way. Finally, one of the friends remarked drily, "But, Niels, this is not really new, you said exactly the same [thing] ten years ago.'
Bohr's philosophy of complementarity is a dualistic doctrine derived from contemplating mentalistic and linguistic paradoxes. Its supporters made unhelpful and occasionally foolish remarks about biology--and, one suspects, about physics as well."
All the best
John B.
