Category: Uncategorized

THE INSTRUMENT. “Bohr emphasized that a macroscopic measuring apparatus, or at least parts of it, can also be treated quantum mechanically.” https://lnkd.in/eauD5rnp View in LinkedIn

SO ENDS this article about Bohr’s thinking by a budding physicist who became a philosopher. To be able to tolerate equally true contradictions in the quantum world requires that we learn to think differently; that something can be simultaneously a wave and a particle, or that something can exist in two places at the same time. Even our language inhibits this progression with our penchant for either-or, and synonyms and antonyms. https://lnkd.in/eauD5rnp View in LinkedIn

ONLY CONTEXTUAL. “For in his view, the wave function is symbolical, and it can be attributed to objects only in experimental contexts which are not themselves described by such wave functions.” https://lnkd.in/eauD5rnp View in LinkedIn

REDUCTIONISM. “In this sense, Bohr’s view contrasts with a dominant reductionist way of thinking in physics. According to reductionism, less fundamental theories (like classical mechanics) should be reducible, or derived in terms of, more fundamental theories (like quantum mechanics).” https://lnkd.in/eauD5rnp View in LinkedIn

DUALITY. “So, do we live in a quantum world? According to Bohr, as I understand him, the answer is no: we live in a world that, at the physical level, can be understood only by referring to both quantum and classical mechanics.” https://lnkd.in/eauD5rnp View in LinkedIn

RARITY. “Quantum mechanics occupies a very unusual place among physical theories: it contains classical mechanics as a limiting case, yet at the same time it requires this limiting case for its own formulation.” https://lnkd.in/eauD5rnp View in LinkedIn

SMALLEST LENGTH. “Bohr emphasized that quantum mechanics is a rational generalization of classical mechanics, among other reasons because the formal expression of classical mechanics can be derived from quantum mechanics in the limit where all actions are large compared to Planck’s constant.” https://lnkd.in/eauD5rnp View in LinkedIn

CONTEXT. “This idea of contextualism can be seen as analogous to the standard idea of wave-particle duality which holds that whether, e.g., an electron is a wave or a particle depends on the experimental context.” https://lnkd.in/eauD5rnp View in LinkedIn

SITUATIONAL ABOVE ALL. “But Bohr also rejects ontological quantum fundamentalism if this is taken to mean that objects are ultimately represented correctly by a wave function. Both because the wave function is symbolic, and because the answer to what an object is, quantum or classical, depends on the context.” https://lnkd.in/eauD5rnp View in LinkedIn

THE FENCE. “This reading of Bohr’s viewpoint might be called restricted quantum universalism. It implies that Bohr rejects epistemological quantum fundamentalism since, in a given experimental context, part of the total system – usually the measuring device – must necessarily be described as classical.” https://lnkd.in/eauD5rnp View in LinkedIn