In a series of papers written in the early 1970s, historian of physics Paul Forman argued that quantum mechanics is best viewed as an expression of anti-rational Weimar culture. The argument is too complex and detailed to really do it justice here, but briefly stated it is that German physics had been associated with German industrial and military strength before the 1st world war, with the war effort during it, and therefor also with the general disaster after it. A new mania for lebensphilosophie swept Germanys intellectual environment. The essential feature of a good lebensphilosophie was that it rejected the deterministic, mechanistic approach to physics epitomized by Newtonian mechanics, and with English and American science more generally. Instead of a dissintegrative appraoch that tries to dissect and classify everything, a good lebensphilosophie tried to look at the wholeness of life and experience and the interrelation between components. This new atmosphere divided physicsts more or less along political lines. Conservatives rejected it, liberals supported it. For the liberal physicists, creating a subatomic physics which would conform to the new intellectual environment would help them recover their lost status. Erwin Schrodinger, Max Planck, Werner Heisenberg, and others, created a new approach to subatomic physics which rejected causality in favor of probability as the essential explanatory agent. In this view, events at the subatomic level do not occur for any particular reason - sometimes a particle decays, sometimes it doesnt. Sometimes an electron is here, sometimes its there. Theres no reason for this - there are only probabilities. Similarly, an electron is neither a particle nor a wave until it is observed, but at that moment it becomes one or the other; a cat left in a box for a week is neither alive or dead, but becomes alive or dead when the box is opened. Parallels between the weird acausality of quantum mechanics and the more general culture of Europe just before and after the war are perhaps not difficult to find. In these same decades Freud was undermining the idea of man as a rational and self-determined agent, while Virginia Woolf and James Joyce were abandoning the objective and netural observer view point in literature, and Picasso and Miese were offering fragmented and disorienting perspectives in visual art. Viewed in this light, Quantum mechanics is a human product, which cannot be understood apart from the values and motivations of the men who created it. This is not to say that it is merely subjective or that it does not describe important elements of reality. Quantum mechanics is useful, and that is why it is still around. But this is a much more modest claim than the more common view, which holds that quantum mechanics (and all scientific theories more generally) are unconditioned and unmediated TRUTHS, and products of the universe rather than of the human mind. Historians of science continue to debate The Forman thesis almost fifty years after its original publication. amazon/Weimar-Culture-Quantum-Mechanics-Contemporary/dp/9814293113/ref=sr_1_1?ie=UTF8&qid=1414717381&sr=8-1&keywords=quantum+mechanics+paul+forman
Posted on: Thu, 01 Jan 2015 21:41:53 +0000
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