Born's Interpretation

Nicolaas P. Landsman

Hrvoje Nikolić

I discuss a hypothetical historical context in which a Bohm-like deterministic interpretation of the Schrödinger equation is proposed before the Born probabilistic interpretation and argue that in such a context the Copenhagen (Bohr) interpretation would probably have not achieved great popularity among physicists.

Art Hobson

Hrvoje Nikolić

I discuss a hypothetical historical context in which a Bohm-like deterministic interpretation of the Schrödinger equation could have been proposed before the Born probabilistic interpretation and argue that in such a context the Copenhagen (Bohr) interpretation would probably have never achieved great popularity among physicists. 1

Aurélien Drezet, CNRS-University Joseph Fourier

Linda Wessels

When Max Born introduced his statistical interpretation of wave mechanics in mid-1926, the reactions were mixed. His most recent collaborator, Pascual Jordan, was delighted; his former assistant, Werner Heisenberg, was horrified. The interpretation served as grist for Neils Bohr's philosophical mill. For Bohr's former collaborator, John Slater, it inspired a strange hybrid interpretation, a sort of statistical version of Schrödinger's electrodynamic model. What was the interpretation that engendered these varied reactions? Neither Born nor most of his contemporaries saw in it anything that even suggests the interpretation that we now associate with his name. Rather, it was another former assistant of Born's, Wolfgang Pauli, with eyes as sharp as his tongue, who saw in Born's work the idea that |Ψ(q)| represents the probability distribution for position.