Category: Uncategorized

Mr Mathew Oates, my dear old school chum, with some budding eco -warriors at Christ’s Hospital, Sussex. View in LinkedIn

INSEPARABILITY. “Bohr believed that the quantum of action (Planck’s constant) is a basic empirical discovery that symbolizes an aspect of wholeness in atomic processes. Such processes cannot be separated from their interaction with the measuring device.” https://lnkd.in/eauD5rnp View in LinkedIn

“DICHOTOMOUS THINKING is an individual's propensity to think in terms of binary opposition, such as “black or white,”“good or bad,” and “all or nothing.” This style of thought may be useful for quick decision-making; thinking dichotomously may lead to wide-ranging personality disorders.” https://onlinelibrary.wiley.com/doi/full/10.1111/j.1468-5884.2012.00515.x View in LinkedIn

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