Abstract
In 1939 London and Bauer published a short pamphlet on the measurement problem in quantum mechanics (London and Bauer. La Théorie de L’Observation en Mécanique Quantique, Hermann. In: Wheeler JA & Zurek WH (eds) Quantum theory and measurement, Princeton University Press, Princeton, p 252, 1939). For many years, physicists and philosophers took this to be merely a re-statement of von Neumann’s view that it is the intervention of consciousness that somehow leads to the wave function collapsing into some definite state. This view was robustly criticised by Putnam and Shimony in the early 1960s and has been generally abandoned ever since. However, before he became a physicist, London studied phenomenology and his work with Bauer is infused with a phenomenological sensibility. In (French, Stud Hist Philos Mod Phys 33:467–491, 2002) I tried to excavate this ‘lost history’ and articulate the details of London’s approach. Here I want to further consider the extent to which this history might be said to have been ‘effaced’, to use Ryckman’s term (Ryckman, 2005) but also indicate how this phenomenological approach might be further articulated in the broader context of recent interpretations of quantum theory and thereby be regarded as a viable alternative.
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Notes
- 1.
Originally published in French and subsequently republished in English translation in Wheeler and Zurek 1983.
- 2.
This amounts to a kind of appropriation of the thought experiment as Schrödinger’s original intention was to undermine Bohr’s insistence on the distinction between macroscopic and microscopic systems, with classical physics applying to the former and quantum theory to the latter.
- 3.
Albert of course was writing at a time when measurement had come to be regarded as just another interaction.
- 4.
An assumption that Bohr would reject of course; for a useful account see Freire 2015, p. 147.
- 5.
This characterisation of the London and Bauer manuscript can be found scattered throughout the relevant literature; see Atmanspacher, 2015.
- 6.
As in (French, 2002) I shall not say much about Bauer, although I will add that in 1933 he published an introduction to group theory and its application to quantum mechanics (Bauer & Meijer, 1962) which is significant, of course, because of London’s involvement with group theory in the late 1920s (Gavroglu op. cit., pp. 53–57).
- 7.
In a sense this is a warning to those, like Kuhn, who are seduced by what Seth calls ‘the romance of revolution’ and fail to note or acknowledge the differences in approach and attitude of different ‘schools’ of physics at the time and, indeed, different physicists.
- 8.
Shimony suggests that it was London’s brother, Heinz, who encouraged him to then go into physics (Shimony in AIP Oral History Interviews, 2002).
- 9.
According to Gavroglu, ‘What London was thinking programmatically in 1921 was very close to Husserl’s thoughts. In this sense London’s problematique was not marginal at all.’ (op. cit. pp. 13–14).
- 10.
Seth suggests that in his interviews with those quantum physicists still alive at the time, one gets a sense of Kuhn posing leading questions in his efforts to elicit a sense that a revolution took place!
- 11.
Gavroglu (1995) has also emphasised the similarities between London’s philosophical and physical concerns, particularly with regard to the treatment of theories as ‘wholes’. He cites Mormann’s claim that London’s 1923 thesis ‘[…I can be considered as a set-theoretic concretization of Husserl’s largely programmatic account of a macrological philosophy of science’ (Mormann, 1991, p. 70; his emphasis).
- 12.
Some have argued that this represents a major break with his earlier work; others that it offers a fresh perspective on it motivated by the socio-political context of the time.
- 13.
Egg draws an interesting parallel between Husserl’s concerns and those motivating certain current forms of the ‘metaphysics of science’ (Egg, 2020).
- 14.
Føllesdal argues that science and the lifeworld should not be seen as being in opposition, since the latter mediates the reference to reality of concepts of the former and acts as the relevant touchstone through scientific revolutions, say (Føllesdal, 1990); see also Bilban (forthcoming) and Egg (2020).
- 15.
Although see Bilban (forthcoming) for an interesting and useful analysis of Bohr’s thought from a phenomenological perspective.
- 16.
It is perhaps worth mentioning that this is a bit of an odd paper, especially from today’s perspective, concerned as it is with the possibility of using quantum entanglement to demonstrate telepathy. A useful context is Kaiser, 2011.
- 17.
The use of the word ‘residue’ is interesting here, particularly given Shimony’s earlier acknowledgement. He also says that the ‘…booklet was more explicit about the intervention of mentality in the measurement process than von Neumann is …’ (Shimony in AIP Oral History Interviews, 2002) because of London’s interest in phenomenology. Shimony goes on to describe how he translated London and Bauer’s pamphlet from the original French and used it in his class at MIT in the late 1950s. He also states that Wigner was keen to see the English translation published with an introduction by himself and that Bauer liked the translation (London of course had sadly died by then) but that the original publishers declined, because, Shimony speculates, they wanted to publish it themselves. As he notes, they thereby lost the opportunity to have it published with commentary by Wigner (it was subsequently published in the Wheeler and Zurek collection of course). As Shimiony goes on to admit, it was the London and Bauer pamphlet that led him into the measurement problem and his paper ‘On the Role of the Observer in Quantum Theory’ was initially presented at a conference on the foundations of quantum mechanics organised by Podolsky in Cincinnati in 1963, with the likes of Wigner, Dirac and Bohm present.
- 18.
Bueno (2019) suggests that there was no such underpinning in the first place, offering a ‘minimalist’ interpretation of the London and Bauer text, stripped of any phenomenological reading. I think such a claim not only goes against London’s own stance towards his work in physics but renders problematic Shimony’s acknowledgement of such a reading.
- 19.
Wigner knew London from their time in Berlin (when Wigner was working on group theory) and described him as ‘a very thoughtful, very industrious, thorough, imaginative person.’ (Interview with Kuhn, Session II, AIP Oral Histories Archive).
- 20.
Wigner’s antipathy to Bohr’s philosophy of complementarity is apparent in his own interview with Kuhn from these archives where he notes that, possibly under the sway of von Neumann, the duality inherent in complementarity is not reflected in the formalism where one can easily find three operators that do not commute, such as in the case of spin (Wigner Interview Session III, AIP Oral History Archives). Given what Bilban suggests in (forthcoming), this displacement may be construed as a further effacement of the phenomenological ‘strand’ of thought.
- 21.
Here Bueno and I agree on the role of Wigner in this history.
- 22.
For a recent revival of the argument, that I also think can be handled phenomenologically, see Frauchiger and Renner (2016).
- 23.
Further evidence of the effect of this co-option can be found in Freire Jr’s commentary on the London and Bauer pamphlet, in his chapter on Wigner, which makes no mention of London’s phenomenological background.
- 24.
And as Freire Jr. also notes (2015 p. 150) as part of that re-orientation, Wigner maintained that the measurement problem should not be dismissed as philosophy of physics but should be regarded as a fundamental part of physics itself.
- 25.
Of course, such considerations should not ignore the prior work of Heelan, for example and in this context see his 2004.
- 26.
Again in his interview with Kuhn, Wigner asks (AIP session III): ‘Why is it that we always see positions macroscopically? Position operator is just an operator like every other operator. What is it that makes our minds principally think in terms of position operators? Why are there macroscopic bodies? Why do they have definite positions rather than having another, arbitrary, wave function, or another, arbitrary, operator measured? I may be completely wrong, but I do feel that there is some mystery here not completely cleared up. Several times I’ve had ideas on this but nothing really convincing.’
- 27.
As Barrett and Byrne note (op. cit., p. 29, fn 2), Everett took a class with Wigner on Methods of Mathematical Physics at Princeton in 1954 and presented this version of the ‘Wigner’s Friend’ argument some years before Wigner’s appeared in print.
- 28.
The notion of freedom being employed here plays a major role with regard to the phenomenological epoché in general.
- 29.
Gleason’s theorem essentially states that the Born rule follows from the lattice structure of events in Hilbert space. One would of course have to give a phenomenological reading of this structure. Alternatively, one might adopt Everett’s argument that an observer’s relative measurement records in a typical branch would be randomly distributed according to the standard quantum probabilities and establish a phenomenologically appropriate ‘typicality measure’ (for a useful discussion of such measures see Barrett, 2017.
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Acknowledgments
I’d like to thank Philipp Berghofer, Tina Bilban, Michel Bitbol, Otávio Bueno, Matthias Egg, Arezoo Islami, Tom Ryckman, Harald Wiltsche and the audience of the conference ‘Phenomenological Approaches to Physics’, Graz, June 2018, for comments and general support.
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French, S. (2020). From a Lost History to a New Future: Is a Phenomenological Approach to Quantum Physics Viable?. In: Wiltsche, H.A., Berghofer, P. (eds) Phenomenological Approaches to Physics. Synthese Library, vol 429. Springer, Cham. https://doi.org/10.1007/978-3-030-46973-3_10
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