Abstract
Professor Putnam’s comments [1] on David Sharp’s paper [2], claiming to have discovered grave inconsistencies in the conceptual structure of quantum mechanics, evidently were not meant to be accepted at face value. The author surely realized that a contradiction as obvious as he claims to have found it, if real, would have been noticed by scores of physicists. Rather, we understand Professor Putnam’s comments as a challenge to restate the theory of measurement in terms which do not use the mathematical formalism of quantum theory and to point to errors in his own argument.
Received, March, 1962.
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References
Putnam, Hilary, Phil. of Science, 28, 234 (1961).
Sharp, D. H., ibid., 28, 225 (1961).
Neumann, J. VON, Mathematical Foundations of Quantum Mechanics (Princeton University Press, 1955 ); German original, Julius Springer, Berlin, 1932.
London, F. and Bauer, E., La Theorie de l’Observation en Mecanique Quantique ( Hermann and Co., Paris, 1939 ).
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Margenau, H., Wigner, E.P. (1997). Comments on Professor Putnam’s Comments. In: Wightman, A.S. (eds) Part I: Particles and Fields. Part II: Foundations of Quantum Mechanics. The Scientific Papers, vol A / 3. Springer, Berlin, Heidelberg. https://doi.org/10.1007/978-3-662-09203-3_46
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