Vienna today is one of the capitals of research on foundations of quantum physics. We reconstruct the development of modern physics in Vienna, with a focus on foundations of quantum mechanics (FQM), which is a sub-field of quantum mechanics. We show that the influence of Erwin Schrödinger and, in more recent years, the initiatives of Anton Zeilinger-the two main intuitive reasons-cannot alone account for today's outstanding research landscape on FQM in Vienna. We highlight four additional factors that played a crucial role in the development of foundational research in Vienna: 1) the Viennese heritage of the cultural golden age just before World War II; 2) the long-lasting institutional connection between the faculty of physics and philosophy; 3) a rise of several initiatives that gave forum to the interplay of physics and philosophy; and 4) the influence of several external scholars in the Viennese scientific landscape. Our analysis is informed by interviews with the most pertinent scientists, a detailed survey of the relevant social networks, and review of the main primary literature.
Vienna today is one of the capitals of research on foundations of quantum physics. We reconstruct the development of modern physics in Vienna, with a focus on foundations of quantum mechanics (FQM), which is a sub-field of quantum mechanics. We show that the influence of Erwin Schrödinger and, in more recent years, the initiatives of Anton Zeilinger-the two main intuitive reasons-cannot alone account for today's outstanding research landscape on FQM in Vienna. We highlight four additional factors that played a crucial role in the development of foundational research in Vienna: 1) the Viennese heritage of the cultural golden age just before World War II; 2) the long-lasting institutional connection between the faculty of physics and philosophy; 3) a rise of several initiatives that gave forum to the interplay of physics and philosophy; and 4) the influence of several external scholars in the Viennese scientific landscape. Our analysis is informed by interviews with the most pertinent scientists, a detailed survey of the relevant social networks, and review of the main primary literature.
Quantum mechanics (QM) has taken on a paradigmatic role in how physics describes and builds new knowledge about the world. It also has a growing role in our society thanks to recent and rapid developments in the field of new quantum technologies. These are becoming increasingly important in our society, in the world of work and which will also decisively influence future socio-economic choices. Also for this reason QM has an increasing role in the education of young people and has been introduced in many different ways also in secondary school in all continents. The change in the theoretical and cultural frame has profound implications that are often not intuitive, which involve the appropriation of a specific way of thinking. Neither macroscopic phenomenology, nor intuition help, because there is no simple evidence of how quantum objects must be thought to interpret that unobservable microscopic world and for which we must enter another interpretative paradigm even if we want to limit ourselves to describe it. PER has carried out several studies on the learning of key concepts, on the learning nodes, the ways of reasoning, the difficulties of the students, their spontaneous ideas, according to two main strands: above all at university level, conceptual difficulties and misunderstandings often linked to a formal approach, which, moreover, underpins the very nature of the entities involved; at secondary school level in relation to how students acquire a quantum view of phenomena on the basis of specific approaches adopted to address QM. In particular, a vast literature, which has increased considerably and especially in relatively recent times, has studied how university students deal with certain concepts such as that of state, superposition, measurement in quantum mechanics rather than how quantum quantities evolve over time. These studies are based on the use of questionnaires that allow to explore different levels: the verbal, formal and representative one, with different representations (eg. wave function, Dirac notation), rather than different representative modes (eg. Graphs of probability amplitudes, or probability distributions). At the secondary school level, the most important studies on student learning were instead conducted evaluating the educational impact and outlining the learning paths of students who had followed formative activities based on differentiated innovative research-based educational paths. In particular, the learning outcomes were compared to those activated by proposals based on the historical reconstruction approach of quantum physics. This approach is privileged in traditional curricula and school texts and consequently in the ways of teachers approaching the topic. It was developed in schools with a narrative or descriptive dimension of solutions based on old physics of quanta for the interpretation of phenomena not explained by classical physics. The innovative approaches instead make use of contexts whose formal treatment is simple (quantum properties described in a two-state space such as polarization or spin) with the aid of simulations that compensate for the problem of students” limited mathematical-formal skills, avoiding any historical reference. In particular, there is a significant difference between the survey tools and the survey contexts in the high school environment compared to surveys conducted with university students. This paper presents a review of the research literature, focusing in particular on the learning processes of secondary school students and outlining how research perspectives have evolved.
This book describes the many aspects of the life and scientific work of Erwin Schrödinger, who, perhaps more than anyone else, serves to represent the whole of modern physics. The contributions to the book are from many hands, and so it seemed useful to me to precede them with a short note giving an uncontroversial account of his life which will serve as a framework into which they can be fitted. Such a collection as this still leaves out many aspects of Schrödinger's thought, for it considers his philosophy only in passing, his poetry not at all and ignores his wide and deep interest in sculpture and painting and in the classics. Schrödinger was born in Vienna on August 12, 1887, and entered the University there to read physics in 1906. He worked there as an assistant from 1910 till his war service, and again after the war. Some short term appointments at Jena, Stuttgart and Breslau led up to his appointment to the chair of theoretical physics in Zürich in 1921. He was already treating a wide range of topics, but concentrating on atomic theory, for the old quantum theory had now entered on its heroic phase of final collapse. His six papers founding wave mechanics came at the end of his Zürich years, and in 1927 he went to the chair in Berlin, to remain there till the advent of Hitler in 1933.
Erwin Schro¨dinger was born in Vienna in 1887, and, by 1927, principally as a result of his celebrated discovery of wave mechanics, he was recognized as one of the most outstanding physicists of his time. In that year he succeeded Max Planck in the prestigious chair of theoretical physics in the University of Berlin and it seemed certain that he would spend the rest of his career there, but the unsettled nature of European politics in the 1930s and 1940s resulted in him instead spending the years 1939 to 1956 in Dublin, where he was Director of the School of Theoretical Physics in the Institute for Advanced Studies from its foundation in 1940.
Abstract Following the path by which humanity learned quantum mechanics can lead to an improved understanding of the theory and the origins of its perceived limitations. Our goal is to retrace the development by investigating primary sources, including original published papers and letters, with attention to their timing and influence. Quantum mechanics began in 1900 with the introduction of Planck’s constant, which lead to the “old” quantum theory and Bohr’s model of the atom. With the introduction of matter waves in 1924, a second more intense period began. By 1928 the complete fundamental structure of quantum mechanics was established with the introduction of the Schrödinger equation, the proof of its equivalence to Heisenberg’s matrix mechanics, and the introduction of the relativistic Dirac equation. The theory retains the same essential form today, fueling the technological revolution that began in the last century. We culminate with an introduction to quantum information and computing. This completely new physical scientific paradigm was developed largely in Germany during a period of enormous social, economic, and political upheaval—in a hostile intellectual environment—that parallels the overturning of classical physics. It is striking that all the problems debated today were immediately recognized by the founders of the theory and instructive to see how they dealt with the various issues. We emphasize the centrality of the often neglected second quantization form of the theory for questions of interpretation and give a detailed examination of von Neumann’s widely misunderstood hidden variable theorem.
In The Conceptual Development of Quantum Physics, Max Jammer observes that “certain philosophical ideas of the late nineteenth century not only prepared the intellectual climate for, but contributed decisively to, the formation of the new conceptions of the modern quantum theory”—specifically, “contingentism, existentialism, pragmatism, and logical empiricism,” which, argues Jammer “united in rejecting causality though on different grounds” and “prepared, so to speak, the philosophical background for modern quantum mechanics.” Regarding this same rejection of causality in physics in Weimar Germany—a rejection central to the quantum interpretation—Paul Forman argues that “substantive problems in atomic physics played only a secondary role in the genesis of this acausal persuasion, [and] that the most important factor was the social-intellectual pressure exerted upon the physicists as members of the German academic community.” Along these same lines, in an interview with Einstein in 1932, James Gardner Murphy said, “scientists live in the world just like other people…. They cannot escape the influence of the milieu in which they live. And that milieu at the present time is characterized largely by a struggle to get rid of the causal chain in which the world has entangled itself.” In all of these cases, the development of quantum physics is attributed to the zeitgeist of the time, with the critics adopting a “hypodermic” model wherein intellectual currents have a direct influence on scientific discovery.
It has been shown at other occasions that recent results of modern physics can be used to shed some more light onto the foundations of the world, provided the actual task of philosophy is being re-interpreted in terms of a theory which is following up the results of science rather than laying the grounds for the latter, contrary to what the original intention of Aristotelian "prima philo- sophia" would imply. As it turns out, the interpretation of the main results of present research dealing with aspects of quantum information theory and quantum gravity, respectively, as well as with self-organized criticality, suffices to re-construct a large class of phenomena not only within the field of physics proper, but also within chemistry, biology, and even the social sciences. We show that questions of ultimate reality and meaning can only be answered within a framework of speculative philosophy which is rooted though in what sceptic philosophy is able to derive from scientific results.