QUANTUM METAPHYSICS - E-thesis

structure and emitted radiation, his appointment to the nobility and to many positions of trust in
influential international organisations such as the Atomic Energy Commission.
At school, Bohr was said to have been interested in many other subjects in addition to
mathematics and natural science. In general he managed well, but writing essays was a source of
difficulties as the young Bohr did not learn to handle the wide range of subjects in an suitably
balanced and superficially cursory manner. 605 Within his family circle, this was taken as
evidence of the wish to be absolutely precise and logically consistent that he had shown ever
since he was small. This characteristic was reinforced during his first year at university when
Bohr, who was participating in a compulsory course by Harald Hoffding on the history and logic
of philosophy, discovered an error in Hoffding’s textbook, already translated into several
languages, and was allowed to help to correct it for the second printing. 606
When preparing his thesis on the theory of electrons in metals (1911), Bohr began little by little
to become aware of the limitations and difficulties of classical physics. In his speech of
acceptance after receiving the Nobel prize in 1922, he pointed out the limitations and weaknesses
of quantum theory which acutely troubled him. Gradually he began to show an increasing
interest in philosophy and epistemology realizing in the course of his research work that the
question of the fundamental nature of reality could no longer be taken as being given a priori.
Physicists could not know in advance what type of world they were investigating. In his
complementarity approach, Bohr tied the foundations of portraying reality to the interaction
between man and nature and the inter-subjective descriptiveness of experience. The detached
observer became an active operator in evolution, interacting with the environment and shaping it
by the choices made. Natural laws became laws invented by humans, but not in a subjective
sense. His approach urges us to see that both our objective manner of describing reality and our
whole language are metaphorical, familiar ways of perceiving the world. 607 The primary task of
physics becomes the development of methods of organising human experience, and the offering
of possibilities to test the central conceptual foundations and dimensions of natural language. 608
Bohr’s philosophical texts are considered to be difficult to understand. The same cannot be said
about his clear articles connected with physics. Bohr obviously handled physical problems using
an analytical approach which was easer to communicate on paper, while his intuitive view to
605 Rozental 1967.
606 Favreholdt 1992, 16-18.
607 Gregory 1988, 96.
228