The article focuses on the misleading story of the so-called Copenhagen interpretation of quantum mechanics. The interpretation was allegedly created as unitary or consistent and shared by its founders in 1927 by virtue of the so-called Copenhagen spirit of quantum theory. The paper is based on the role which two leading figures, Niels Bohr and Werner Heisenberg, played in this story. The first part of the article introduces variations of what is considered to be Copenhagen interpretation. The second part reveals that while quantum mechanics had originated in the 1920s, the Copenhagen interpretation was mainly a problematic Heisenbergʼs product of the 1950s. One of his main motivations for the introduction of Copenhagen interpretation was to set up a defence against increasing criticism of the supporters of quantum theory. Since there was no unitary or consistent interpretation of quantum mechanics among members of the so-called Copenhagen school, the last part of the paper focuses on several differences primarily between Bohr and Heisenberg’s interpretation.
The article focuses on the misleading story of the so-called Copenhagen interpretation of quantum mechanics. The interpretation was allegedly created as unitary or consistent and shared by its founders in 1927 by virtue of the so-called Copenhagen spirit of quantum theory. The paper is based on the role which two leading figures, Niels Bohr and Werner Heisenberg, played in this story. The first part of the article introduces variations of what is considered to be Copenhagen interpretation. The second part reveals that while quantum mechanics had originated in the 1920s, the Copenhagen interpretation was mainly a problematic Heisenbergʼs product of the 1950s. One of his main motivations for the introduction of Copenhagen interpretation was to set up a defence against increasing criticism of the supporters of quantum theory. Since there was no unitary or consistent interpretation of quantum mechanics among members of the so-called Copenhagen school, the last part of the paper focuses on several differences primarily between Bohr and Heisenberg’s interpretation.
Of all the many rival interpretations of quantum mechanics, none is more important or influential than the Copenhagen interpretation. Unfortunately, there is no one Copenhagen interpretation of quantum mechanics. If one uses the expression, and everyone does, one should not think of the Copenhagen interpretation as a single consistent interpretation of the theory. Philosophers of physics tend to use the expression ‘the Copenhagen interpretation of quantum mechanics’ as a label covering a variety of different interpretations all of which either originate with Niels Bohr or were invented by him, his colleagues and guests at the Institute for Theoretical Physics in Copenhagen beginning in the middle 1920s. Perhaps one should say that the Copenhagen interpretation in this diffuse sense goes back farther than this, back even before the rise of the new quantum mechanics. Heisenberg tells the story of a boat trip he, Bohr, and some friends took from Copenhagen to the island of Fyn around the time when the then new quantum mechanics was being developed. Bohr, ‘full of the new interpretation of quantum theory’, talked of ‘the difficulties of language, of the limitations of all our means of expressing ourselves’ and of how these limitations had been expressed ‘in the foundation of atomic theory in a mathematically lucid way’. ‘Finally,’ Heisenberg ends the story, ‘one of the friends remarked drily, “But, Niels, this is not really new, you said exactly the same ten years ago”
Přispěvek se zaměřuje na zavadějici přiběh o tzv. kodaňske interpretaci kvantove mechaniky, již jako udajně nerozpornou ci jednotnou vytvořili a sdileli na zakladě tzv. kodaňskeho ducha kvantove teorie jeji tvůrci v roce 1927. Clanek bude vychazet z role, kterou v tomto přiběhu sehrali předevsim N. Bohr a W. Heisenberg. Prvni cast přispěvku seznamuje s variacemi toho, co se v literatuře považuje za kodaňskou interpretaci. Druha cast odhaluje, že zatimco kvantova mechanika vznikla ve dvacatých letech 20. stoleti, kodaňska interpretace je veskrze problematickým a předevsim Heisenbergovým produktem z let padesatých. Jednou z hlavnich motivaci, kvůli niž vystoupil s tzv. kodaňskou interpretaci, byla obrana vůci množicim se kritikam obhajců kvantove teorie. Jelikož mezi cleny tzv. kodaňske skoly nepanovala žadna jednotna ci nerozporna interpretace kvantove mechaniky, zaměřuje se posledni cast přispěvku na několik vybraných rozdilů hlavně mezi Bohrovým a Heisenbergovým výkladem kvantove teorie.
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.
According to the standard view, the so-called ‘Copenhagen interpretation’ of quantum mechanics originated in discussions between Bohr and Heisenberg in 1927, and was defended by Bohr in his classic debate with Einstein. Yet recent scholarship has shown Bohr's views were never widely accepted, let alone properly understood, by his contemporaries, many of whom held divergent views of the ‘Copenhagen orthodoxy’. This paper examines how the ‘myth of the Copenhagen interpretation’ was constructed by situating it in the context of Soviet Marxist critique of quantum mechanics in the 1950s and the response by physicists such as Heisenberg and Rosenfeld.
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.
What is commonly known as the Copenhagen interpretation of quantum mechanics, regarded as representing a unitary Copenhagen point of view, differs significantly from Bohr's complementarity interpretation, which does not employ wave packet collapse in its account of measurement and does not accord the subjective observer any privileged role in measurement. It is argued that the Copenhagen interpretation is an invention of the mid-1950s, for which Heisenberg is chiefly responsible, various other physicists and philosophers, including Bohm, Feyerabend, Hanson, and Popper, having further promoted the invention in the service of their own philosophical agendas.