Statistical Interpretation of Quantum Mechanics
The published work for which the honor of the Nobel prize for the year 1954 has been accorded to me does not contain the discovery of a new phenomenon of nature but, rather, the foundations of a new way of thinking about the phenomena of nature. This way
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The published work for which the honor of the Nobel prize for the year 1954 has been accorded to me does not contain the discovery of a new phenomenon of nature but, rather, the foundations of a new way of thinking about the phenomena of nature. This way of thinking has permeated experimental and theoretical physics to such an extent that it seems scarcely possible to say anything more about it that has not often been said already. Yet there are some special aspects that I should like to discuss. The first point is this: the work of the Gottingen school, of which I was at that time the director, during the years 1926 and 1927, contributed to the solution of an intellectual crisis into which our science had fallen through PLANCK's discovery of the quantum of action in the year 1900. Today physics is in a similar crisis-I do not refer to its implication in politics and economics consequent on the mastery of a new and terrible force of nature, but I am thinking of the logical and epistemological problems posed by nuclear physics. Perhaps it is a good thing to remind oneself at such a time of what happened earlier in a similar situation, especially since these events are not without a certain element of drama. In the second place, when I say that physicists had accepted the way of thinking developed by us at that time, I am not quite correct. There are a few most noteworthy exceptions-namely, among those very workers who have contributed most to the building up of quantum theory. PLANCK himself belonged to the sceptics until his death. EINSTEIN, DE BROGLIE, and SCHRODINGER have not ceased to emphasize the unsatisfactory features of quantum mechanics, and to demand a return to the concepts of classical, Newtonian physics, and to propose ways in which this could be done without contradicting experimental facts. One cannot leave such weighty views unheard. NIELS BOHR has gone to much trouble to refute the objections. I have myself pondered on them and believe I can contribute something to the clarification of the situation. We are concerned with the borderland between physics and philosophy,
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M. Born, Physics in My Generation © Springer Science+Business Media New York 1969
PHYSICS IN MY GENERATION and so my physical lecture will be partly historically and partly philosophically colored, for which I ask indulgence. First of all, let me relate how quantum mechanics and its statistical interpretation arose. At the beginning of the 192o's every physicist, I imagine, was convinced that PLANCK's hypothesis was correct, according to which the energy in oscillations of defmite frequency 1.1 (for example, in light waves) occurs in finite quanta of size h. Innumerable experiments could be explained in this manner and always gave the same value of PLANCK's constant h. Furthermore, EINSTEIN's assertion that light quanta carry momentum h~.~fc (where c is the velocity of light) was well supported by experiment. This meant a new lease of life for the corpuscular theory of light for a certain complex of phenomena. For other process
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