Home >
Quantum > Foundations
Foundations of Quantum Mechanics
The Foundations of Quantum Mechanics is a research effort to explain the puzzling aspects of quantum mechanics, especially the
weirdness of quantum
entanglement, which appears to permit
nonlocal communications between widely separated quantum systems at faster than light speed, violating the special theory of relativity.
The search for new foundations may be traced back to the great debates between
Niels Bohr and
Albert Einstein in the 1920's and 1930's.
Bohr worked with
Werner Heisenberg to develop the
Copenhagen Interpretation of quantum mechanics which became the "
orthodox"
interpretation for many decades. Bohr discouraged efforts to try to understand what is really going on at the microscopic level in quantum systems.
Copenhageners were proud of their limited ability
to know. Bohr famously said:
There is no quantum world. There is only an abstract quantum physical description. It is wrong to think that the task of physics is to find out how nature is. Physics concerns what we can say about nature.
Bohr thus put severe epistemological limits on knowing the Kantian "things in themselves," just as
Immanuel Kant had put limits on reason. The British empiricist philosophers
John Locke and
David Hume had put the "primary" objects beyond the reach of our "secondary" sensory perceptions. In this respect, Bohr shared the positivist views of many other empirical scientists,
Ernst Mach for example. Twentieth-century analytic language philosophers thought that philosophy (and even physics) could not solve some basic problems, but only "dis-solve" them by showing them to include conceptual errors.
Neither Bohr nor Heisenberg thought that macroscopic objects actually are classical. They both saw them as composed of microscopic quantum objects.
On the other hand, Bohr and Heisenberg emphasized the importance of conventional classical-physics language as a tool for
knowledge. Since language evolved to describe the familiar world of "classical" objects in space and time, they insisted that somewhere between the quantum world and the classical world there must come a point when our observations and measurements can be expressible in classical concepts. They argued that a measurement apparatus and a particular observation must be describable classically in order for it to be understood and become knowledge in the
mind of the observer.
Einstein discovered nonlocal behavior in 1905 and spent the rest of his life hoping for a return to a "reality" that does not depend on measurements and human observers. Bohr and Heisenberg said that properties of quantum objects come into existence when the object is observed, they are
created by their measurement.
In the 1960's
Richard Feynman doubled down on attempts to understand in calssical terms what is going on in quantum mechanics.
In his famous
Lectures on Physics (some of the lectures were repeated in the 1967
Messenger Lectures at Cornell and published as
The Character of Physical Law), Feynman famously said that "
nobody understands quantum mechanics" and that the
two-slit experiment contains "all of the mystery of quantum mechanics."
I will take just this one experiment, which has been designed to contain all of the mystery of quantum mechanics, to put you up against the paradoxes and mysteries and peculiarities of nature one hundred per cent. Any other situation in quantum mechanics, it turns out, can always be explained by saying, 'You remember the case of the experiment with the two holes? It's the same thing'. I am going to tell you about the experiment with the two holes. It does contain the general mystery; I am avoiding nothing; I am baring nature in her most elegant and difficult form.
The journal
Foundations of Quantum Mechanics was founded
Normal |
Teacher |
Scholar
|
