Dr Faustus of Modern Physics - Department of Speech, Music and ...

170 CHAPTER 37. QUANTUM MECHANICS: BOHR
is the wave-particle dilemma... So unable is the good average physicist
to believe that any sound person could refuse to accept the Copenhagen
oracle... (Schrödinger in a letter to Synge 1959)
• I no longer like to assume with Born that an individual process is “absolutely
random”. I no longer believe that this conception accomplishes
much. (Schrödinger in a letter to Wilhelm Wien in 1926)
• It seems to me that the concept of probability is terribly mishandled
these days. A probabilistic assertion presupposes the full reality of its
subject. No reasonable person would express a conjecture as to whether
Caesar rolled a five with his dice at the Rubicon. But the quantum
mechanics people sometimes act as if probabilistic statements were to be
applied just to events whose reality is vague. (Schr odinger to Einstein
1950)
• De Broglie, the creator of wave mechanics, accepted the results of quantum
mechanics just as Schr odinger did, but not the statistical interpretation.
(Born in the Born-Einstein Letters)
• This inhibits us from accepting in a naive way a “blurred model” as an
image of reality...There is a difference between a shaky or not sharply
focussed photograph and a photograph of clouds and fog banks. (Schrödinger
about the Copenhagen interpretation)
• Bohr wants to complement away all difficulties.
• Almost all other fellows do not look from the facts to the theory but
from theory to the facts; they cannot extricate themselves from a once
accepted conceptual net, but only flop about it in a grotesque way.
• Bohr is completely convinced that any understanding in the usual sense
of the word, is impossible. Therefore the conversation is almost immediately
driven into philosophical questions, and soon you no longer
know whether you really take the position he is attacking, or whether
you really must attack the position that he is defending.
• We cannot really change our forms of thought, and what we cannot
understand within these forms, we cannot understand at all.