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CRC Press eBooks

The Copenhagen Interpretation

Jonathan Allday

Published Mar 3, 2009• 2 citations
Publisher

Abstract

With this sort of confusion among his close colleagues, it’s surprising that Bohr had the range of in uence that he did. Perhaps this was due to his personal magnetism and conviction. As Pauli pointed out: “Bohr himself integrated, in lectures at international congresses and at those carefully planned conferences in Copenhagen, the diverse scienti c standpoints and epistemological attitudes of the physicists, and thereby imparted to all participants in these conferences, the feeling of belonging, in spite of all their dissensions to one large family.”1

DOI
10.1201/9781584887041-35

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With this sort of confusion among his close colleagues, it’s surprising that Bohr had the range of in uence that he did. Perhaps this was due to his personal magnetism and conviction. As Pauli pointed out: “Bohr himself integrated, in lectures at international congresses and at those carefully planned conferences in Copenhagen, the diverse scienti c standpoints and epistemological attitudes of the physicists, and thereby imparted to all participants in these conferences, the feeling of belonging, in spite of all their dissensions to one large family.”1
The Copenhagen Interpretation of quantum mechanics has become the standard way of explaining the physical philosophical meaning of the mathematics of microscopic behavior. It developed from the thought of people who attended the Institute for Theoretical Physics of the University of Copenhagen during the 40 years that Niels Bohr directed it, from 1920 to 1962. Bohr took a large part in developing the Copenhagen Interpretation, he didn't escape all controversy over it (although the quote above is a bit of an exaggeration). Bohr did die before the experimental theoretical developments that have transposed the debate over the appropriateness adequacy of the Copenhagen Interpretation into a new key, he may well have been lucky to have escaped when he did. There is no authoritative codification of CI [the Copenhagen Interpretation], write T Gornitz C. E von Weizsacker of the Max Planck Institute in Starnberg, West Germany in' their formal presentation to the recent Loyola Conference on Mathematical Interpretational Problems in Relativistic Quantum Theory, and under the conditions of its origin there probably could not be one.... All prominent authors of the time who wrote on these questions, like Bohr, [Werner] Heisenberg, [Wolfgang] Pauli, J[ohn] v[on] Neumann on one side, [Albert] Einstein [Erwin] Schrodinger on the other, fell, so we feel, into some stammering when they tried to express their own positions. Nevertheless there is what might be called a Copenhagen attitude. It concentrates on observable phenomena, makes statistics probability central to its understanding, considers quantum mechanics primarily a theory of knowledge or information becomes a kind of physica negativa (analogous to a theologia negativa) in trying not to say too much about things that can't be seen or felt. For example, it doesn't much care whether the orbits of electrons in atoms are real or not and, in fact, tends to regard them as unreal. It appears in most textbooks as the standard way of looking at things.
The political attitude and the ideology of a very small elite of physicists (Niels Bohr, Werner Heisenberg, Max Born and view other) played a major role in the construction of the Copenhagen Interpretation of quantum mechanics in the 1920s.Lastly, the hegemonic standard acausal Copenhagen Interpretation of quantum mechanics abandoned the principle of causality in quantum mechanics and opened a very wide door to mysticism, logical fallacies and wishful thinking in physics and in science as such.Historically, the Second International Congress for the Unity of Science (Copenhagen, June 21-26, 1936) tried to solve the problem of causality within physics but without a success.Thus far, 80 years after the Second International Congress for the Unity of Science this publication will expel Bohr's and Heisenberg's dogma of non-causality out of quantum mechanics and re-establish the unrestricted validity of the principle of causality at quantum level and under conditions of relativity theory by mathematizing the relationship between cause and effect in the form of the mathematical formula of the causal relationship k.In contrast to Bohr, Heisenberg and other representatives of the Copenhagen interpretation quantum mechanics, a realistic interpretation of quantum theory grounded on the unrestricted validity of the principle of causality will expel any kind of mysticism from physics and enable a quantization of the gravitational field too.
‘The new wave mechanics gave rise to the hope that an account of atomic phenomena might be obtained which would not differ essentially from that afforded by the classical theories of electricity and magnetism. Unfortunately, Bohr's statement in the following communication of the principles underlying the description of atomic phenomena gives little, if any, encouragement in this direction.’ This comment is to be found in the brief note prefaced by the editors of the British journal Nature to Niels Bohr's paper ‘The Quantum Postulate and the Recent Development of Atomic Theory’ in the supplement of 14 April 1928. The article in question is the famous paper which first introduced and defined the concept of ‘complementarity’ and outlined the basic points of what was to become known as the Copenhagen interpretation of quantum mechanics. In the paper, Bohr returned to the arguments contained in the paper discussed at the International Congress of Physicists held at Como in September 1927 to mark the centenary of the death of Alessandro Volta and published in the proceedings of the same congress. It was probably his conviction that the new viewpoint adopted in the description of nature fully expressed the theoretical and cognitive content of quantum physics coupled with his enthusiasm at having achieved ‘after many years of struggling in the dark […] the fulfilment of the old hopes’ that induced him to give his work broader and more prestigious circulation.