Comment on Schlick
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Comment on Schlick Grete Hermann1
© The Author(s) 2020
The problem of natural philosophy raised by quantum mechanics can be characterised with two pairs of statements that have featured in Schlick’s discussion but without Schlick having highlighted, let alone resolved, the contradiction that seems present between the propositions of each pair: (1a) The uncertainty relations do not represent merely subjective limits to possible observations, in the sense that there should be real features of a physical system that are unobservable. Rather, an atomic system has no simultaneously sharp position and momentum. (1b) Nevertheless, the replacement of a state description of a system, which is to be performed based on a measurement – say of a wave function that is ‘spread out’ over the whole of space – through another one – say a wave function with exact specification of position –, cannot be understood as specifying a real physical process in space in which a wave extended over the whole of space ‘shrinks’ to a wave packet concentrated within a small range of positions. (A notion which, apart from other physical absurdities, would include the assumption of processes propagating superluminally.) Similarly the contrast in the other pair of claims: (2a) The intuitive conceptions of classical physics prove inadequate to the task of a fully quantum mechanical description of a physical system. (2b) Nevertheless, according to Bohr’s correspondence principle, also in quantum mechanics every single step from an observation to how it is put to use in the physical formalism, and vice versa from a formula derived in the formalism to the corresponding prediction of an observation, can and must be interpreted entirely using the classical-intuitive conceptions. The seamless reconciliation of the respective (a) and (b) is possible only by supposing that the quantum mechanical state description of a physical system – as opposed to the Written by Grete Hermann, translated by Guido Bacciagaluppi from the reprint in Kay Herrmann (Ed.), Grete Henry-Hermann: Philosophie – Mathematik – Quantenmechanik. Dordrecht: Springer 2019, pp. 273–274. Originally published in German as ‘Zum Vortrag Schlicks’ (‘On Schlick’s Talk’), Erkenntnis 6(5/6), 342–343 (1936). Thanks to the editors for a careful reading of the translation. Grete Hermann—deceased (1901–1984). * Grete Hermann [email protected] 1
Østrupgård, Denmark
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state description in classical physics – does not pretend to characterise the physical system uniquely and adequately, but only relative to the context of observation then present, and that it changes with the latter. Thereby however, as shown by more detailed considerations, the opposition disappears that Schlick claims between the limitations of knowledge demonstrated by Kant in his doctrine of transcendental idealism and the limits of natural description that quantum mechanics forces us to recognise – at least insofar as one takes into account the corrections brought by Fries and Nelson to the f
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