Fritz London and the measurement problem: a phenomenological approach

Joel Brooks Hunter

Steven French

Francis Fer

Dan Zahavi

In his book A Phenomenological Approach to Quantum Mechanics: Cutting the Chain of Correlations Steven French presents an interpretation of Fritz London's and Edmond Bauer's 1939 monograph La théorie de l'observation en mécanique quantique that acknowledges and engages with the phenomenological theorizing underlying their approach to the measurement problem. My aim in the following contribution is twofold. I will first offer some historical and systematic arguments for why it might indeed be worthwhile to explore the link between phenomenology and quantum mechanics. In the second part of the paper, I will then look closer at French's interpretation, especially his understanding of reflection, and express some reservations about a central argument of his.

Trevor W. Marshall

Steven French

Abstract The measurement problem remains one of the outstanding issues in the foundations of quantum theory: how do we go from the multiple options encoded in the wave-function to the definite outcome that we observe? One of the most well-known solutions to this problem maintained that it is the observer’s consciousness that somehow causes the wave-function to collapse. Now widely dismissed for introducing an irreducible element of subjectivity into science, both advocates and critics cited a ‘little book’, La Théorie de L’Observation en Mécanique Quantique, by Edmund Bauer and Fritz London (1938; English trans. 1983) as giving the clearest presentation of this solution. However, as well as being an extremely accomplished physicist, London was also trained in the phenomenological tradition that was initiated by the philosopher Edmund Husserl. This casts his work with Bauer in an entirely new and different light, and by assigning a very different and more profound role to consciousness in resolving the measurement problem, yields an understanding of quantum theory that has not hitherto been fully explored. The aim of this book is to initiate just such an exploration. It begins by setting London and Bauer’s ‘little book’ in its historical and philosophical context and then draws out the implications for not only quantum physics but our view of science and the world more generally.