Posted on 05/20/2007 7:56:14 PM PDT by betty boop
On Complementarity: A Tale of Two Friends
Albert Einstein and Niels Bohr were great friends. Of this extraordinary friendship a mutual friend would write, “Their relations were marked not only by profound mutual respect but also by great affection, if not love.”1 It is a friendship that history records as one of most contentious, yet fruitful, and splendidly illuminating of all time. For the two friends engaged in a great debate over many decades — a public one, with “all comers” invited. History will likely record it as one of the greatest extended public debates on issues in science, the philosophy of science, ontology, and epistemology in the annals of human thought. Clearly it is the most brilliant — and challenging — of the modern age.
Both men were founders of revolutionary physical theories that shook the very ground under the “classical physics” of Kepler, Copernicus, Galileo, and Newton. Einstein is the father of relativity theory; Bohr, father of the Copenhagen Interpretation of quantum mechanics, of which Max Planck — discoverer of the quantum and of the associated quantum of action — was the actual founder.
Einstein’s relativity explores the universe at scales immensely larger than we humans normally encounter in the “classical world” of our daily experience. Bohr did the same for the universe at scales immensely smaller. Indeed, both theories describe the totality of the universe in ways we cannot visually imagine, nor perhaps our minds fully comprehend.
But then, as Bohr put it, “all new experience makes its appearance within the frame of our customary points of view and forms of perception.”2
The history of science grandly testifies to the manner in which scientific objectivity results in physical theories that must be assimilated into “customary points of view and forms of perception.” As we engage in this assimilation process, it does occasionally happen that the subjective character of experience is emphasized in unexpected ways. The framers of classical physics derived, like the rest of us, their “customary points of view and forms of perception” from macro-level visualizable experience. Thus the descriptive apparatus of visualizable experience came to be reflected in the classical descriptive categories.3
Classical physics evolved in this framework of “customary points of view and forms of perception,” which are ultimately rooted in visualizable experience. Classical physics speaks the language of bodies in motion in four-dimensional spacetime. It speaks of that part of the universe that can be detected within certain normative bands of perception and measurement.
Now it seems both relativity and quantum theory describe realities that are not contained within this “normal” or “usual” band detectable by direct visual observation. Like the infrared and ultraviolet of the solar light spectrum, there are “ends of the band” in both directions that seemingly fall off any measurable scale — as least as far as direct perception is concerned. But we still know “they’re there” by indirect means.
The fact is, neither of the “worlds” that Einstein and Bohr contemplate — the world of the very, very large, and the world of the very, very small — can be “visualized” at all.
Bohr often emphasizes that our descriptive apparatus is dominated by the character of our visual experience and that the breakdown in the classical description of reality observed in relativistic and quantum phenomena occurs precisely because we are in these two regions moving out of the range of visualizable experience.4
Both men employed the classical language of Newtonian mechanics — Einstein by conviction, Bohr as a matter of principle: “Since the quantum world is unvisualizable, this creates an epistemological situation that for Bohr seems to derive from his frequent description of quantum mechanics as a ‘rational generalization of classical mechanics’ and his requirement that the results of quantum mechanical experiments ‘must be expressed in classical terms.’”5
For Einstein, relativity theory took classical mechanics “to the next level.” But for Bohr, quantum mechanics is not an extension of classical mechanics. Instead, he viewed classical mechanics as a subset, or “approximation that has a limited domain of validity,”6 of a more general physical situation which is comprehensively described by QM.
Bohr wrote that “Just as relatively theory has taught us that the convenience of distinguishing sharply between space and time rests solely with the smallness of the velocities ordinarily met with compared with the speed of light, we learn from the quantum theory that the appropriateness of our visual space-time descriptions depends entirely on the small value of the quantum of action compared to the actions involved in ordinary sense perception. Indeed, in the description of atomic phenomena, the quantum postulate [the indeterminacy principle et al.; see below] presents us with the task of developing a ‘complementary’ theory the consistency of which can only be judged by weighing the possibilities of definition and observation.”7
Or to put it another way:
Just as we can safely disregard the effects of the finiteness of light speed in most applications of classical dynamics on the macro level because the speed of light is so large that relativistic effects are negligible, so can we disregard the quantum of action on the micro level because its effects are so small. Yet everything we deal with on the macro level obeys the rules of relativity theory and quantum mechanics, and … unrestricted classical determinism does not universally apply even in our dealings with macro-level systems. Classical physics is a workable approximation that seems precise only because the largeness of the speed of light and the smallness of the quantum of action give rise to negligible effects.8
The Language of Classical Physics
The basic assumptions of classical physics, otherwise known as scientific realism, might be summarized as follows:
(1) The physical world is made up of inert and changeless matter, and this matter changes only in terms of location in space;
(2) the behavior of matter mirrors physical theory — there is a one-to-one correspondence between any given phenomenon and the physical laws that apply to it — and physical theory is inherently mathematical;
(3) matter as the unchanging unit of physical reality can be exhaustively understood by mechanics, or by the applied mathematics of motion; and
(4) the mind of the observer is separate from the observed system of matter, and the ontological bridge between the two is physical law and theory.9
Given (2) and (4), classical theory expects that a tree falling in the forest makes a sound regardless of whether there is an observer around to notice it. This is “the realist view.” And evidently, this was Einstein’s view.
Another key assumption of classical realism is that the universe is inherently “local.” That is to say, all physical causation is the result of the actions of bodies in close proximity to each other. Quantum theory, however, shows that the universe is inherently non-local: Our classical ideas of causation utterly break down in the quantum world. This Einstein would never accept — he dismissed this sort of thing as “spooky action at a distance.”
Einstein never would accept quantum mechanics as a “complete” physical theory: He thought there must be something lacking in it, a more fundamental mathematical basis that had not been elucidated in Bohr’s Copenhagen Interpretation. As an aside, it seems that if Einstein was a “realist,” then he was a realist in the Platonist sense of that word; for Platonist realism holds the ultimate basis of the universe is a mathematical structure.
In the late 1920s, the “debate” between the two friends was joined and continued for decades, up to the time of Einstein’s death in 1955. “Eventually, the dialogue revolved around the issue of realism, and it is this issue that Einstein felt would decide the correctness of quantum theory.”10 Evidently to his dying day Einstein never accepted quantum mechanics as the complete description of the physical processes of the universe — though not for lack of continual concerted effort on Bohr’s part to convince him otherwise.
The Copenhagen Interpretation of Quantum Mechanics
Before we get into the substance of Einstein’s and Bohr’s “friendly dispute,” a few words describing the Copenhagen Interpretation of quantum mechanics are in order. The Copenhagen Interpretation consists of four major principles:
(1) Heisenberg’s uncertainty (indeterminacy) principle, which holds that one can know the position of a sub-atomic particle, and one can know its velocity, but not both at the same time. In effect, in the design of experiments to probe the quantum world, we are forced to choose which we would observe: the object in its particle form, or in its wave form. As Bohr put it, “We have to choose what we’ll observe and measure, and by choosing, we destroy our ability to know and measure the complementary property…. It’s not about what we don’t know, it’s about what we can’t know.”11
(2) The observer principle, the idea that a system is affected by an observer. This is so for three reasons. First, as already mentioned, the observer must choose how he wishes to view the quantum system under study: Is it a particle or a wave? Second, “Whether an object behaves like a particle or a wave depends on what apparatus you choose to look at it with. And the apparatus, the object, and the observer are all part of the overall system.”12 “The hard lesson here from the point of view of classical epistemology is that there is no god-like perspective from which we can know physical reality ‘absolutely in itself.’ What we have instead is a mathematical formalism through which we seek to unify experimental arrangements and descriptions of results.”13 Third, the act of observation itself disturbs the observed object, and thus changes the total system.
(3) The probabilistic nature of quantum effects, a fundamental implication of both Schroedinger’s wave equation and Heisenberg’s matrix mechanics.14 Einstein strongly objected to this aspect of QM, famously saying that “God does not play dice”: The probabilistic nature of QM is deeply unsettling to the classical expectation that a one-to-one correspondence between physical nature and the physical laws must exist. As Bohr’s great biographer and colleague Abraham Pais writes, “The general laws of quantum mechanics imply that, as a matter of first principle, one cannot know all the determining elements of the present with unlimited accuracy.”15 Thus statistical mathematics must be our guide.
(4) Bohr’s complementarity principle, perhaps his greatest achievement:
The logical framework of complementarity is useful and necessary when the following conditions are met: (1) when the theory consists of two individually complete constructs [e.g., is it a particle or a wave?]; (2) when the constructs preclude one another in a description of the unique physical situation to which they both apply [i.e., you can only pick one of the two for study at any given time]; when both [taken together] constitute a complete description of that situation.16
Thus, as Nadeau and Kafatos write, “Knowledge here can never be complete in the classical sense because we are unable to simultaneously apply the mutually exclusive constructs that constitute the complete description.”17
Or as Bohr himself put it: “…a great truth is a statement that is as true as its opposite… As opposed to a triviality, whose opposite is false. It is our job as scientists to reduce great truths to trivialities.”18 The statement has enormous implications for epistemology in general.
Pais would write: “Personally I have found the complementary way of thinking liberating.”19 Others, evidently including Einstein, do not. Where Bohr would say you need both of these mutually exclusive entities in order to make a complete description of the system, for Einstein, “If two descriptions are mutually exclusive, at least one of them must be wrong.”20
The two friends’ great debate commenced at the 1927 Solvey Conference, which has been described as “the Allstar Game, Woodstock, and the Olympics of theoretical physics, all rolled into one.”21 The greatest minds of physics and mathematics then living were there: Max Planck, Niels Bohr, Albert Einstein, Werner Heisenberg, Erwin Schröedinger, Wolfgang Pauli, Hendrik Kramers, Paul Dirac, Louis de Broglie, Max Born, Marie Curie, et al. And evidently, intense conversations were joined in the after hours of the formal program.
In formal session, Werner Heisenberg, Bohr’s close colleague, had said: “The boundary between the object in quantum theory and the observer who describes or measures it in time and space can be pushed further and further in the direction of the observer…Knowledge of the ‘actual’ is thus, from the point of view of quantum theory, by its nature always incomplete knowledge.”22
Einstein strongly objected to this: “Quantum mechanics is very impressive, but an inner voice tells me that it is not yet the real thing. All these probabilities mean it must not be complete.”23
So Einstein composed a series of gedankenexperiment, or thought experiments, telling Bohr et al. that “you’re all ‘egg walkers’ willing to go to the greatest lengths to avoid the physically real. Quantum mechanics can’t be complete, [because of] this uncertainty principle of yours…. God does not play dice.”24
Einstein was, you see, not only a “classical scientist” in the manner of Sir Isaac Newton, but also a Newtonian “realist”: Bodies are what they are, and have the characteristics they have, entirely independently of an observer. Or to put the matter another way, all of reality is “local”: there is a one-to-one correspondence between every real phenomenon and the physical laws that pertain to it. So the physical features of any particle — such as mass, velocity, spin, etc. — are innate in the object. That is, they are “physically real” properties, and not something endued in the object by an act of observation. They are completely “real” independent of considerations of any “probability distribution” intended to deal with uncertainty considerations, for the simple reason that real particles are characterized by inherently “certain” properties.
Einstein’s Great Thought Experiments
The debate between Einstein and the Bohr camp was taken up again, at the next Solvay Conference in 1930, at which Einstein presented “after hours” his famous “clock in a box” thought experiment, which he believed constituted a complete refutation of the Copenhagen Interpretation.
Einstein’s thought experiment was constructed as follows:
“We start with a box that has a hole in one wall. A shutter covers the hole and the shutter is controlled by a clock.
“Fill the box with photons…. That is, particles, not waves …and weigh the whole thing.
“Then, have the clock open the shutter briefly and let out a single photon. Weigh the box again and…because we know the mass of the box before and after the shutter opened, we know the photon’s mass. Remember E = mc2? If we know its mass, we know its precise energy, too. We know the precise time it had because of the clock. But that contradicts your uncertainty relationship, DEDt ³ h…which says that you can’t know a particle’s energy and the time it had that energy with perfect accuracy….”25
Bohr and Heisenberg at first were stumped by Einstein’s ingenious gedankenexperiment, and quite taken aback. But the next morning (after an “all-nighter” one supposes), they made their reply:
“Albert. Not to criticize, but…of course you recall your first paper on relativity, yes? You know, the one that proposes curved space and inconsistent time? In it you showed that when, say, a clock in a box moves through a gravitational field, that affects how time passes for it. [The faster an object moves, the more time slows for it.] Well, changing the weight of the box changes how much it pulls on the spring. And so the spring must move the box upward…through a gravitational field…as it gets lighter. Now we observers on the other hand don’t move relative to the field…. But the clock in the box does move, so time passes differently in there. This introduces an uncertainty in when the shutter opened. As we can show, that uncertainty comes out to exactly h”26: Planck’s constant, the measure of quantum uncertainty. Heisenberg’s uncertainty, or indeterminacy principle was back with a vengeance.
It was, for Einstein, a temporary set-back. Non-plussed, in the course of events he took “one more shot at quantum theory five years later.”27
By this time Einstein had grudgingly come to accept the uncertainty principle; but he still insisted that the QM theory was “incomplete.” So together with the brilliant young physicists Boris Podolsky and Nathan Rosen, he set about constructing another gedankenexperiment that was to focus on experiments involving the creation of pairs of particles in “entangled” states, experiments that would successfully demonstrate that if, say, one electron has a particular spin, then its entangled other’s spin must match. (The same principle was later applied to experiments with the polarization of photons in entangled states.)
Thus the EPR experiment, as it came to be known, was a direct challenge to the Copenhagen Interpretation, which held that we can’t know the spin either electron has without observing (measuring) it.28
Einstein thought that if one of the electrons moves far, far away before the first one of the pair is measured, and both are subsequently found to have coordinated spin, then in order for Bohr to be “right,” then somehow the first electron had to communicate its spin to the second one. But Einstein’s special relativity says that nothing can travel faster than light; so Einstein asked, “How do you explain this ‘spooky action at a distance?’” If the two electrons are widely separated in space (e.g., 11 kilometers or even half a universe away), this would mean that some sort of communication between the two must have taken place that would have had to violate the universal speed limit of the universe — which is the speed of light. No signal can travel faster than the speed of light. That cannot be allowed, since such a thing would “destroy” all of physics, classical and relativistic.
Einstein, Podolsky and Rosen argued that “There must be something going on here that quantum theory doesn’t know about — and so quantum theory is incomplete.”29
And the reason it is incomplete: “because it does not meet the following requirement — ‘Every element in the physical theory must have a counterpart in physical reality.’”30
The EPR thought experiment envisioned two photons, each originating from a definite quantum state, and then moving apart from each other, not interacting with any other phenomena until we decide to “observe,” or measure one of them.
Robert Nadeau and Menas Kafatos present an excellent summary of the EPR experiment31 :
The quantum rules allow us to calculate the momentum of two particles in a definite quantum state prior to separation, and the assumption in the EPR thought experiment is that the individual momentum of the two particles will be correlated after the particles separate. If, for example, two photons originate from a given quantum state, the spin of one particle will strictly correlate with that of the other paired particle. We are then asked to measure the momentum of one particle after it has moved a sufficient distance from the other to achieve a space-like separation. As noted earlier, this is a situation where no signal traveling at the speed of light can carry information between the two particles in the time allowed for measurement. Assuming that the total momentum of the two particles is conserved, we should be able … to calculate the momentum of the paired particle that was measured or observed based on measurement or observation of the other paired particle.
Since measurement of the momentum of one particle invokes the quantum measurement problem, Einstein conceded that we cannot know the precise position of this particle. In spite of this limitation, however, he assumed that measurement of the momentum of the particle we actually measured would not disturb the momentum of the space-like separated particle, which could be as far away from the first as one likes. Since we can calculate the momentum of the particle that was not measured and we know the position of the particle that was measured, this should allow us, claimed Einstein and his colleagues, to deduce both the momentum and position of the particle that was not measured. And this, they argued, would circumvent the rules of observation in quantum physics.
The point was that if we can deduce both the position and momentum for a single particle in apparent violation of the indeterminacy principle, it is still possible to assume a one-to-one correspondence between every aspect of the physical theory and the physical reality. The paper concludes that the orthodox Copenhagen Interpretation “makes the reality of [position and momentum in the second system] depend on the process of measurement carried out in the first system which does not disturb the second system in any way. No reasonable definition of reality could be expected to permit this.”32
Bohr’s rejoinder: “The observer and the electrons [or photons] are part of a single system. And that system doesn’t care about our ideas of what’s local and what’s not. Once connected, atomic systems never disentangle at all. No matter how far apart they are.”33 He also complained that “measurement by proxy does not count.”34
And Bohr was right, as subsequent experiments showed: “This instant communication, which apparently violates Einstein’s fundamental upper limit of the speed of anything, has been demonstrated experimentally.”35
Experimental Tests of EPR
Testing the EPR case had to wait some three-plus decades before suitable, technologically advanced measurement tools became available. When that happened, the thought experiment was quickly translated into empirical form. The first actual laboratory experiment to test the EPR gedankenexperiment was performed by John S. Bell in 1964. Bell by many reports was sympathetic to Einsteins’s side of the debate. Nevertheless his test results indicated that Bohr’s view was actually correct. Had Einstein been living at the time of Bell’s findings, perhaps he might finally have conceded that his friend Bohr was actually right.
To understand Bell’s enormous contribution to this debate, a little background on the man is necessary. Bell, working out of CERN in Switzerland, deduced mathematically the most general relationships that could obtain between two particles, and showed that certain kinds of measurement made it possible to distinguish between the positions of Einstein and Bohr. At bottom, it came down to local realistic theories (emphasizing locality and physical realism) and the seemingly “spooky actions” of the Copenhagen Interpretation (emphasizing indeterminacy/uncertainty of quantum events and the indispensability of the observer).
Bell’s mathematical statement of the situation is called Bell’s inequality theorem. In effect, it acknowledges the seeming discontinuity between the Einsteinian and Bohrian views of objective reality. It is predicated on the two major assumptions of all local realistic theories — locality and physical realism. Remember that locality requires that signals or any other kind of transfer of energy between space-like separated regions cannot occur at speeds exceeding the speed of light. And realism holds that physical reality exists fully independently of acts of observation: it does not require an observer to constitute it. So far, it looks like Bell’s book is stacked in favor of Einstein and EPR, and against Bohr and the Copenhagen Interpetation.
Yet Bell also realized that both formalisms could be mathematically described. And so Bell’s inequality essentially boils down to the apparent incommensurability of the two formalisms. Furthermore, it turns out that the formalism of quantum physics indicates that neither the EPR nor the Bohr/Heisenberg assumption need necessarily be valid; and so experimental tests are required in order to settle the issue for any particular case.
Such experiments were forthcoming, starting with Bell (1964) and, later, with Alain Aspect (early 1980s) and Nicolus Gisin (1997).
Alain Aspect (born 15 June 1947 in Agen) is a French physicist and alumnus of the École Normale Supérieure de Cachan in France. In the early 1980s, with collaborators in France, he performed the crucial “Bell test experiments” that showed that Albert Einstein, Boris Podolsky and Nathan Rosen’s reductio ad absurdum of quantum mechanics, namely that it implied “ghostly action at a distance,” did in fact appear to be realized when two particles were separated by an arbitrarily large distance. A correlation between their wave functions remained, as they were once part of the same wave function that was not disturbed before one of the child particles was measured.
If quantum theory is correct, the determination of an axis direction for polarization measurement of one particle [photon in this case], forcing the wave function to “collapse” onto that axis, will influence the measurement of its twin even if this is on a distant star. This influence occurs despite the experimenters concerned not knowing which axes have been chosen by their distant colleagues.
Aspect’s experiments were considered to provide overwhelming support to the thesis that Bell’s inequalities are violated [i.e., the locality and physical realism criteria found not to hold]. However, his results were not completely conclusive, since there were so-called loopholes that allowed for alternative explanations that comply with local realism.36
As for the takeaway from Gisin’s experiments, Gisin himself writes:
It has occurred to me recently that the gulf between the Einsteinian local action verses the Copenhagen quantum non-local action theories may be closed and the differences reconciled by viewing the two as complementary to each other just as wave and particle actions are complementary in the quantum sense. That is, since the notion that a particle can have both a wave and particle aspect ascribed to its nature depending on whether or not it is observed, the parallel concept may be adopted when considering whether the action is viewed using photons or not. If viewed by photon [e.g., particle] methods of measurement, then the action may be considered to be local and time-like. If the action is not viewed by photon reaction, then the action may be considered space-like. It is possible that a particle may be ascribed either nature according to the method of measurement. Then both space-like and time-like are characteristics that all quantum particles can have at any time. Further, all quantum particles are connected to each other through the space-like attribute with a zero time of interaction.
The space-like nature of a particle is able to correlate action to a dual partner in zero time (this has been proven in repeated experiments) and thus offers no paradox to the nature of special relativity [i.e., there is no violation of the universal speed limit]. [On the other hand,] the
time-like nature of a photon reaction measurement is subject to special relativity and thus would be considered a local reaction….37
[For details of these ground-breaking experiments, see the excellent book, The Non-Local Universe by Robert Nadeau and Menas Kafatos, cited many times before now in this essay.]
In the end, what all these experiments seem to agree on is this: Ultimately the observer is not superfluous to, nor can he be eliminated from, the investigation of objective physical reality, at any scale: Newtonian, relativistic, or quantum. The reference point of the observer ultimately is the ground from which the determination of what is “local” and what is “non-local” is made.
And paradoxically, that means that both Einstein and Bohr were right. For when it comes to adducing objective truths about reality, the observer is just as indispensable a part of the understanding of relativity as the observer is of the quantum microworld.
So take the two men together, as magnificent “complementarities,” each man in his own right, both on a quest for truth according to his best lights. Though it may appear at first sight that Einstein and Bohr propound mutually exclusive visions of the universe, we find in the final analysis that the insights of both are needed “for the complete description of the system.”
The Epistemological Take-away
There remains yet another issue to consider here. Seemingly, Einstein and Bohr articulated what seem to be mutually exclusive views of reality. If Einstein was “right,” then Bohr had to be “wrong.” Aristotle’s law of the excluded middle is operative and prominently featured in Einstein’s style of thinking; but this was not a style of thinking to which Bohr gave his unqualified assent.
Adopting the complementary style of thinking, we may accept that both men were right: You need both in order to have the complete description of the system which both men observed, each according to the spirit of truth as each man experienced it, as highly-qualified “observers.”
Einstein was an fascinating thinker in that, as a “realist,”
he resonated to the chords of both Platonic and Newtonian/Aristotelian philosophical “realism.” As such, he was a sort of actual, walking-around complementarity in his own right.
Bohr for his part said: “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.”38 Implicit in Bohr’s remark is the profound recognition: If you can’t observe it, you can’t describe it. Thus, you can have nothing to say to science. Where Einstein appears open to metaphysical speculation, Bohr is not. Given the irremediable uncertainties of human knowledge, Bohr instead asserts the primacy of a rigorous epistemology.
This doesn’t necessarily mean that Bohr failed to recognize
something more fundamental to nature than what could be detected by observers and their instruments. Evidently this was Einstein’s belief, made explicit in his remark that what he longed for was to “transform the ‘base wood of matter into the pure marble of geometry.’” Bohr may or may not have been drawn to this aspect of the quest for truth. One surmises he was aware of this dimension of human knowledge and experience. To the extent he acknowledged it as a legitimate inquiry of human thought and investigation, however, it appears he did not regard it as a subject properly falling within the scope or methods of the physical sciences.
Bohr’s epistemology is severe — and extraordinarily beautiful. If followed by scientists, not a single inkling of metaphysical speculation or doctrinal thinking could get through “the back door” of scientific investigation.
And that, arguably, is the beauty of Bohr’s entire line of thinking — and the reason it is still so resisted, so long after his death in 1964, by philosophical materialists, methodological naturalists, and metaphysical naturalists of all stripes. Bohr wanted to strip metaphysics — overt or covert — from the physical sciences altogether.
In the end, Einstein and Bohr — these two beautiful friends, essential complementarities for all their seemingly mutually-exclusive differences — together light our world for us in the here and now — and give science a firm basis from which to securely proceed to its next great transformative discoveries.
— Jean Drew
Notes:
1 Abraham Pais, Neils Bohr’s Times, in Physics, Philosophy, and Polity. Oxford: Oxford University Press, 1991, p. 21.
2 Robert Nadeau and Menas Kafatos, The Non-Local Universe: The New Physics and Matters of the Mind. New York: Oxford University Press, 1999, p. 96.
3 Ibid., p. 96f.
4 Clifford A. Hooker, “The Nature of Quantum Mechanical Reality,” in Paradigms and Paradoxes (Pittsburgh: University of Pittsburgh Press, 1972) p. 137; quoted in op. cit., Nadeau/Kafatos, p. 90.
5 Ibid., p. 88.
6 Ibid., p. 88f.
7 Ibid., p. 91.
8 Ibid., p. 91.
9 Ibid., p. 84.
10 Ibid., p. 65.
11 Jim Ottaviani, Leland Purvis, et al., Suspended in Language: Niels Bohr’s Life, Discoveries, and the Century He Shaped. Ann Arbor, MI: G.T. Labs, 2004, p. 136f.
12 Ibid., p. 151f.
13 Op. cit., Nadeau/Kafatos, p. 92f.
14 Ibid., p. 150f.
15 Op. cit., Pais, p. 23.
16 Ibid., p. 95.
17 Ibid., p. 95.
18 Op. cit., Ottaviani, Purvis, et al., p. 120.
19 Op. cit., Pais, p. 24.
20 Op. cit., Ottaviani, Purvis, et al., p. 151.
21Ibid., p. 151f.
22Ibid., p. 153.
23 Ibid., p. 153f.
24 Ibid., p. 155f.
25 Ibid., p. 157.
26 Ibid., p. 160f.
27 Ibid., p. 161.
28 Ibid., p. 161.
29 Ibid., p. 162.
30 Op. Cit., Nadeau/Kafatos, p. 67.
31 For details of the general form of such experiments, see op. cit., Nadeau/Kafatos, p. 71f.
32 Ibid., p. 68.
33 Op. cit., Ottaviani, Purvis, et al., p. 162f.
34 Op. Cit., Nadeau/Kafatos, p. 68.
35 Ibid., p. 163.
36 Alain Aspect; see article at http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Alain_Aspect.
37 Nicolus Gisin, “Quanta,” http://users.zipworld.com.au/~damir/quanta.htm.
38 Op. Cit., Nadeau/Kafatos, p. 96.
Hope this might help. It's an article from the Appendix of our book -- that is, Alamo-Girl's any my collaboration on the foundations of Western culture, of which the natural sciences are the splendid fruits.
FYI!
bump
Just in case you might be interested in these questions....
Thank you for this piece. I’m reading carefully, very interesting. Will add something later, I hope.
Schrodinger’s dead cat/live cat in the box and quantum jumping. One doesn’t know if the cat is alive or dead until you open the box.
bookmark
In classical and medieval philosophy, the subject is nothing more than merely the thing presented to the intelligence; the object is the intelligible light under which the subject is understood--that is, the subject as objectified in this or that fashion. There is, in other words, no split between the subject and object: what we have, rather, is an intelligible relation between (in Aristotelian terms) a potency and its act: the subject is potentially objectifiable in any given number of ways; it is actually objectified in single judgments, in each of which the intellect predicates meaning or intelligibility of the subject--that is, asserts that what it understands of the subject actually exists in the subject. The contemporary use of the term subject and object is, in consequence, far removed from the classical usage and the doctrine that underlies it--so far, that we can fairly say of the meanings as having been reversed.
bookmark
Try this : demonstrate a time event that is NOT a kinetic energy event($1000 cash prize if you can). And in a private reply I’ll explain where both Einstein and Bohr went wrong. The third person here should have been Louis DeBroglie and his U=c^2/v equation for the speed of a matter wave crest, but they put him in the “crazy aunt alice” category because of it. HE was the one right all along.
Thank you so very much for posting this, my dearest sister in Christ!
*Bumpmark*
” One doesn’t know if the cat is alive or dead until you open the box.’
Nothing quantum about that.
In quantum mechanics, the cat is neither dead nor alive until you open the box.
Thanks.. I am interested in these questions and more..
Whatever you have to say is always interesting to me..
You're not all spit curls and poo_poop_de_doop Betty..
Bohr was brilliant. His theories provide at least a channel to a good way of unifying science and spirituality.
Like, *PING*, dudes!
save for later
An aside...Bubba beats the 23rd Amend. (using the "two-fer" thinking) if Hildebeast becomes POTUS.
The mind is nothing but sensation and is furnished by the body. Dropping back to Ockham, much cited but little read, we find our terms need to be defined in two groups--mental language and spoken or written language. They are not the same.
Correct, because no measurement, or wave function collapse if you prefer, has occurred until the box is opened.
Agreed, with a minor addendum.
... and a conscious entity has ‘measured’ the state of the cat.
This implies they both happen concurrently.. Has to happen when referencing "matter" since no known meme can identify matter.. Is matter solid, gas, or liquid.. elementally.. Is hot or cold valid measurements?... Are those two reality's present when dealing with particles and/or waves?..
Einsteins and Bohr's observations were from different vistas.. and are pregnant with implications.. No matter how much you think you know you are merely an observer.. These two men were honest observers..
Then you have ((ME)).. I think in this Universe there is a large "pool" of Dark matter/energy that say (("GOD")) can designate/make/create/modify/remodel into Light matter/energy (which is what WE"humans" call matter/energy)..
Undesignated ((or Dark) matter/energy}, and Designated ((or Light) matter/energy).. As it says in the Book of Genesis where God remodeled this Planet.. Meaning he Undesignated and RE-designated some of the "matter/energy".. I like this diagnosis cause it makes sense..
I know .... I'm "out there" so to speak.. Could be that is what so-called "heaven" will be like for some(of US).. Traveling this Universe and undesignateing and re-designateing various heavenly bodys that are just NOT pretty enough, cool enough, or good enough.. Good enough for WHAT?.. For lifeforms SILLY...
Note: Einstein must've thought Bohr was a Moonbat and Bohr would have no doubt considered me one too.. I have a "few" that I consider Moonbats too.. I call it the observer problem..
“Is matter solid, gas, or liquid.’
No. Those are phases of matter, not matter.
Hot and cold are valid, if relative, measurements.
“Are those two reality’s present when dealing with particles and/or waves?..”
What are you asking? Temperature is a condition that is always present, being a scale from 0 Kelvin to infinity.
Since no one knows(Physics) what matter really is.. How can the temperature of it be a known attribute.. What appears to hot/cold could in reality be something else.. say movement of matter/energy.. "or something"..
Temperature refers to the average kinetic energy of a material’s atoms or molecules. Heat usually means the amount of thermal energy present, while temperature describes its intensity or hotness.
Plotinus not good enough?
Quantum Mechanics says matter is just energy in another form.. and vice versy.. Then you got your photons, sorry, damn.. Back to what I said.. Temp could be movement of a particle or wave.. which are mirror images of the same thing.. Whatever that thing is.. no one knows exactly..
Plotinus was clueless about Dark energy/matter.. which some say is 95%+ of the Universe.. I would say NOPE.. merely another observer..
The word ‘temperature’ is defined as particle movement. To say it’s caused by something else doesn’t change the original definition. If you want to redefine temperature, that’s fine. However, a definition that contains an inscrutable ‘something else’ will not be as useful as the present one.
They were not wrong. We also ought to review Ockham. It’s reaching way back into time before modern science, but they had the same questions. Their major works are available, and in their quaint personal Latin or in translation.
I hear ya.. It urinates me off also that MATTER is so hard to define.. If it can even BE defined accurately.. I like things simple.. and tend to edit all things.. Except my own vanity..
Theories of matter and energy that allow predictions which can be verified are worth using. They make technology possible. Relegating molecular theory to ‘something else’ requires that the ‘something else’ theory outperform current theory and yield comparable benefits. So far, no joy.
Ockham was an optimist.. I am a Opto-pessimist.. I hope and pray for the best but expect the worse..
A Tom Clancy quote would be good right now.. "The difference between fiction and reality is that fiction has to make sense".. Reality does not have to make sense.. I HATE THAT..
Not true.. Optimists crawl my nape..
Ockham was a nominalist. The first. Goedel said he preferred fables since they are at least consistent.
(cutting toenails).. Joseph Campbell was like that(Goedel)..
Here's one that struck me:
Bohr often emphasizes that our descriptive apparatus is dominated by the character of our visual experience and that the breakdown in the classical description of reality observed in relativistic and quantum phenomena occurs precisely because we are in these two regions moving out of the range of visualizable experience.
While I can't speak for others, for me even math is a very "visual" sort of thing -- I tend to do it by "seeing" how various parts of the problem move around, and have difficulty when I cannot do so.
I suppose others sense math differently, but I think it's very true that, in general, math has to be "sensed" in some way. Which is to say, even the mathematical bases of Einstein's and Bohr's theories are probably in some sense limited by "visualizable experience."
We all have an observer problem based on our understanding of "reality" - i.e. what is "all that there is." Your musings on designated v undesignated is a case-in-point.
It's not so bad if we understand that the one is efficacious to lead to the other, not exhaustively, but sufficiently.
More problematic is the complete identity of the thinking subject and the object.
Well all the matter/energy must be included.. if matter/energy is to be referenced at all.. You know in this realm/paradigm/dimension(1-4).. The Spiritual Dimension/realm/paradigm would probably be another matter.. beyond matter/energy.. Could be that SPIRIT is not matter OR energy..but "something else"..
Most of what passes for thought is simply sensation. The small part that is decision-making is the ability to filter out bad choices. This comes from Herder through James with some recent scientific measurements that show the action center activates 200 milliseconds before the conscious center activates. See? that's the extent of free will. Very simple, and no cartesian dualism.
Right Whale, are you saying that "the mind is what the brain -- a 'bloody sponge' -- does?" You seem to be in the British empiricist camp here -- Locke, Mill, Hume, that the mind essentially consists from sense impressions.... In another post, you suggested that this view is also the view of William James. But as much as James tells us he admires the British empiricists, he really does take them to task for supposing that the mind reduces to "sense impressions."
If the mind reduces to sense impressions, then how do we account for Hamlet?
Very perceptive, r9etb. People with strong "visual imaginations" often seem to have what we might call an innate mathematical sense, probably essentially geometrical in form. This would help in the perception of higher-order spatial/temporal relations (which are not themselves "sense impressions!!!"). In Einstein's case, he longed to discover the fundamental geometry specifying the universe. He was convinced it must be there.... I gather this was part of the reason why he did not regard Bohr's Copenhagen Interpretation of QM as "the real deal." For Einstein, it was too shifty, too uncertain, too provisional, too contingent, to be the final basis of all physical reality -- the "base wood" that Einstein longed to see transformed into the "pure marble of geometry."
Thank you so much for your kind words, r9etb -- truly I'm glad you found this article interesting!
That’s the way it appears to be. This is in the tradition of Whitehead. BTW, somebody should translate Whitehead into English; it would benefit those who want to read Whitehead but can’t make the transition from his mental language to written language.
James was on the trail. It starts with the triviality of Descartes, Spinoza, Leibniz, and only Leibniz is the live trail. Then it goes to Vico and Herder, to James, to Whitehead and to modern neuroscience. The body suggests motions and the conscious mind judges whether to allow or block the motion. This is done in the claustrum. The presentation of possible motion occurs about 200 milliseconds before the mind decides. This is the reverse of what would happen if the mind were the originator and activated the motion. The problem of how the mind causes the body to move has been removed.
Back to where it came from when that body was concieved.. and the spirit added to it.. silly..
WHere is that?.. The Spirit Pool.. kind of like Universal Jury Duty.. only more serious..
And the "mental history blanked" once selected.. back to that place...
Oh. Heaven, that’s nice. [Waves vaguely toward the sky.]
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