Physical Aspects of Quantum Mechanics
The purpose of this communication is not to give a report on the present status of quantum mechanics. Such a report has recently been published by W. Heisenberg , the founder of the new theory (Die Naturwissenschaften, 45, 989, 1926). Here we shall make a
- PDF / 18,736,085 Bytes
- 179 Pages / 439.374 x 666.133 pts Page_size
- 74 Downloads / 232 Views
MAX BORN PHYSICS IN MY GENERAT ION
~
Springer Science+Business Media, LLC
ISBN 978-0-340-16963-6 ISBN 978-3-662-25189-8 (eBook) DOI 10.1007/978-3-662-25189-8 Second revised edition. All rights reserved. No part of this book may be translated or reproduced in any form without written permission from Springer Science+Business Media, LLC.
© 1969 by
Springer Science+Business Media New York Originally published by Springer-Verlag New York, Inc. in 1969
Library of Congress Catalog Card Number 68-59281 Title Number 3916
PREFACE THE idea of collecting these essays occurred to me when, in the leisure of retirement, I scanned some of my own books and found that two of the more widely read show a startling change of attitude to some of the fundamental concepts of science. These are Einstein's Theory of Relativity of 1921 and the American edition of The Restless Universe of 1951. I have taken the introduction of the former as the first item of this collection, the postscript to the latter as its last. These books agree in the relativistic concept of space and time, but differ in many other fundamental notions. In 1921 I believed-and I shared this belief with most of my contemporary physicists-that science produced an objective knowledge of the world, which is governed by deterministic laws. The scientific method seemed to me superior to other, more subjective ways of forming a picture of the worldphilosophy, poetry, and religion; and I even thought the unambiguous language of science to be a step towards a better understanding between human beings. In 1951 I believed in none of these things. The border between object and subject had been blurred, deterministic laws had been replaced by statistical ones, and although physicists understood one another well enough across all national frontiers they had contributed nothing to a better understanding of nations, but had helped in inventing and applying the most horrible weapons of destruction. I now regard my former belief in the superiority of science over other forms of human thought and behaviour as a self-deception due to youthful enthusiasm over the clarity of scientific thinking as compared with the vagueness of metaphysical systems. Still, I believe that the rapid change of fundamental concepts and the failure to improve the moral standards of human society are no demonstration of the uselessness of science in the search for truth and for a better life. The change of ideas was not arbitrary, but was forced on the physicists by their observations. The final criterion of truth is the agreement of a theory with experience, and it is only when all attempts to describe the facts in the frame of accepted ideas fail that new notions are formed, at first cautiously and reluctantly, and then, if they are experimentally confirmed, with increasing confidence. In this way the classical philosophy of science was transformed into the modern one, which culminates in NIELS BoHR's Principle of Complementarity. To illustrate this process I have selected some of my popular writings co
Data Loading...
