Abstract Wrestling with quantum concepts could sometimes take a heavy toll. Paul Ehrenfest committed suicide in 1933. Pauli sought help from Carl Jung. Others saw parallels between quantum physics and human psychology. Bohr sought to define the quantum domain, to complete and package it, so that he would be related to the quantum theory as Einstein was to relativity. He believed that he was called to proclaim the gospel of complementarity, extended to the domain of human affairs and which, ‘better than any religion . . . would afford people the guidance they needed’. He was soon grappling with pronouncements made by more excitable members of his flock, as their intrusions into biology and philosophy were quickly condemned. The missionaries of the Copenhagen spirit enjoyed a success that was limited largely to a few philosophically inclined physicists of continental Europe. Neither British nor American theorists had need of it.
Abstract Wrestling with quantum concepts could sometimes take a heavy toll. Paul Ehrenfest committed suicide in 1933. Pauli sought help from Carl Jung. Others saw parallels between quantum physics and human psychology. Bohr sought to define the quantum domain, to complete and package it, so that he would be related to the quantum theory as Einstein was to relativity. He believed that he was called to proclaim the gospel of complementarity, extended to the domain of human affairs and which, ‘better than any religion . . . would afford people the guidance they needed’. He was soon grappling with pronouncements made by more excitable members of his flock, as their intrusions into biology and philosophy were quickly condemned. The missionaries of the Copenhagen spirit enjoyed a success that was limited largely to a few philosophically inclined physicists of continental Europe. Neither British nor American theorists had need of it.
SUMMARY. — The formalisms of quantum mechanics, invented in 1925-26, were very quickly and successfully deployed in solving many problems of atomic and molecular physics. For most physicists these successes expressed the physical meaning of the theory. For a few others, mainly German-speaking physicists closely associated with Niels Bohr, quantum mechanics brought a new definition of knowledge applicable to all exercises of the pure and applied reason. In this paper I describe some of the psychological traits of Bohr and the young men he inspired to extend his epistemological teachings to biology, depth psychology, and other fields remote from the quantum theory of the atom. By calling attention to these traits I aim not to belittle Bohr's thought or its extrapolations, but rather to show how an unsystematic philosophy developed in a particular time and place, and with reference to special problems in atomic physics, could have laid claim to universal validity. I conclude with a parallel between Bohr and his band on the one hand and Newton and his immediate disciples on the other.
‘The Institute’ describes the work undertaken at Bohr’s headquarters in Copenhagen. It prospered under the ‘Copenhagen Spirit’, as Heisenberg called Bohr’s approach to quantum problems, and money from the Rockefeller, Carlsberg, and Rask-Ørsted Foundations and the Danish government. The Institute saw a decline in the early 1930s owing to Bohr’s doubts about certain productive ideas in nuclear physics that his philosophy seemed to rule out. Their productivity changed his mind and he raised money to build the large apparatus for experimental investigation of the nucleus. At the same time, he applied complementarity to biology and other domains outside of physics, to the dismay of Einstein, who continued to try to find ways to contravene what he called Bohr’s ‘tranquilizing philosophy’.
Abstract Our drama deals with the distinctly human compulsion to divide the world into domains of experience, like religion and physics, defined by rules and expectations. Fundamentalists pursue the illusory goal of a final theory of everything belonging to a domain. Their aim is closure – to declare that no plausible alternatives are possible. Neils Bohr sought to close the domain of quantum mechanics within a few years of its discovery. Albert Einstein objected to this hasty surrender of the possibility of alternatives more in keeping with classical intuition. Bohr’s efforts to achieve closure in the face of Einstein’s attempts to prise it open framed one of the most dramatic debates of twentieth-century science, and led to experimental discoveries that deepened the mystery and may yet profoundly impact our lives.
Abstract The confrontation between Einstein and Bohr over the interpretation of quantum theory has been painted in the past as a direct conflict between realism and positivism. However, more recent attempts to uncover the philosophical positions of both Einstein and Bohr have revealed that these were not so black and white. Einstein’s realism was conditioned by the strong empiricist influence in his own early experiences as a theorist and the growing wariness that led him eventually to reject Machian positivism. His was a realism born of a sense of necessity: a belief that a realist stance is the only one that leads to productive theorizing about the physical world. Bohr’s philosophy went through some quite marked changes, principally in response to Einstein’s challenges. The father of modem atomic theory could hardly subscribe to an uncompromising positivist position that rejected the reality of atoms. But the reality of the inner workings of those atoms was, Bohr contended, beyond the reach of a knowledge founded on complementary classical concepts of waves and particles. As Einstein’s challenges became deeper and more subtle, so Bohr’s position shifted to that of a distinctive anti-realism. Add to this a rhetoric in Bohr’s speeches and published writings that insisted on the logical inevitability of the Copenhagen interpretation, that insisted on its status as the only feasible interpretation, and that countenanced no other alternative, and you have dogma in the making. Heisenberg called it ‘Kopen hagener Geist der Quantentheorie’, the Copenhagen spirit of quantum theory which, he declared in 1930, ‘has directed the entire development of modem atomic physics’. Einstein frequently referred to the Copenhagen doctrine as ‘Talmudic’.
This paper examines the transformation of Bohr's interpretation of quantum phenomena and quantum mechanics, known as complementarity, from the version presented in his famous Como lecture (1927), which introduced complementarity, to a new version that was developed by Bohr shortly thereafter, in part under the impact of his intervening exchanges with Einstein. While the existence of more than one version of Bohr's complementarity (and of still different versions of the Copenhagen interpretation by others) has been noted, Bohr's rethinking itself of complementarity has rarely been adequately addressed. Apart from refining and indeed correcting the Como argument, the transformation in question was, I argue, defined by a shift from a more philosophical to a more experimental argument. My aim is to explore both this shift and the complexity of the relationships between physics and philosophy in Bohr's thinking in order to understand better the beginnings and the ends, also in the sense of aims, of Bohr's complementarity.
The phenomenon of consciousness includes mysterious aspects providing a basis for many spiritual doctrines (including religions) and psychological practices. These directions of human knowledge are usually considered to contradict the laws of science. However, quantum mechanics - in a sense, the mysterious direction of science - allows us to include the phenomena of consciousness and life as well as the relevant phenomena in the sphere of science. Wolfgang Pauli, one of the pioneers of quantum mechanics, together with great psychologist Carl Gustav Jung, guessed about the relation between quan