Abstract
It is generally known that the philosophy of science of Karl Popper, and in particular the concept of falsifiability as a criterion of demarcation, was heavily influenced by the revolutionary developments of physics at the beginning of the twentieth century. However, only in recent years some attention has been devoted to the many contributions that Popper gave directly to the philosophy of physics. In this chapter, we focus on Popper’s work in the foundations of quantum mechanics. Popper’s endeavor in that field lasted for almost six decades, and allowed him to become part of the community of “dissidents” who questioned the quantum orthodoxy, and to have profound interactions with some of the most prominent physicists of his times (such as Einstein, Heisenberg, Bohr, de Broglie, Schrödinger and Bohm). In particular, already in his old age, Popper proposed a variant of the EPR experiment that could allegedly put to the test the Heisenberg’s uncertainty principle, and which caused great controversy in the following years.
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Notes
- 1.
Technically speaking, what fails in quantum mechanics is the distributive law (which is one of the properties that characterizes Boolean algebra) for empirical propositions, due to the existence of incompatible observables (i.e. not commuting operators); see (Del Santo 2020) and references therein for further details.
- 2.
All citations from Popper (1967, 11–14).
- 3.
It should be stressed that Bohm was present at the first symposium in 1957, when Popper’s propensities were first presented. Moreover, he had been regularly in touch with Popper for a decade since then, but it seems that he was not aware of propensities yet. This corroborates our thesis that up until QMwO physicists, even those close to Popper, paid little attention to Popper’s ideas related to quantum foundations.
- 4.
Sect. 3.4 of (Del Santo 2019) is devoted to the debate between Popper and Feyerabend triggered by the publication of QMwO. A dedicated paper is in preparation: Del Santo, F. “Beyond method: The diatribe between Feyerabend and Popper over the interpretation of quantum mechanics”, to appear in a special issue edited by M. Stuart and J. Shaw on “Feyerabend and the History and Philosophy of Physics” in Studies in History and Philosophy of Modern Physics.
- 5.
It should also be remarked that Popper has been among of the first authors to respond in print to the pivotal result of Bell's theorem, at a time when it was completely overlooked (Popper 1971).
- 6.
- 7.
- 8.
- 9.
- 10.
A preliminary discussion on this issue can be found in (Del Santo 2018).
- 11.
Relevant discussions about Popper’s contribution to the foundations of physics (besides the many historiographical reconstructions mentioned above) can be found in (Jammer 1991) and (Redhead 1995), respectively written at the end of Popper’s career and immediately after his death. More recently, the online Journal Quanta devoted its first issue to Popper’s philosophy of quantum physics (http://quanta.ws/ojs/index.php/quanta/issue/view/1/showToc), whereas a part (4–B) of (Javie et al. 2006) reassessed some of Popper’s work on physics in modern perspective.
- 12.
We should notice that Popper’s falsificationism does not enjoy large support among philosophers of science today, who have harshly criticized it as a too narrow and naive view. Among Popper’s critics, we ought to mention the greatly influential Thomas Kuhn and Paul Feyerabend, whereas a failure of Popper’s falsificationism in historical perspective has been recently provided by Brush and Segal (2015). Despite this, as noted by Kragh (2013), it can be contented that “Karl Popper’s philosophy of science […] is easily the view of science with the biggest impact on practising scientists”.
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Del Santo, F., Freire Jr., O. (2021). Popper and the Quantum Controversy. In: Parusniková, Z., Merritt, D. (eds) Karl Popper's Science and Philosophy. Springer, Cham. https://doi.org/10.1007/978-3-030-67036-8_2
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