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Articles

Bohr & Kant & Zeno

Would it not be nice if there were a simple foundation to quantum physics? Tony Wagstaff believes there is; and that the Greeks had it.

During the opening decades of the 20th century, as the secrets of quantum theory emerged, so the underlying reality it purported to describe turned odder and odder. Electrons, photons, even cats, all seem to exist in a ghostly limbo with no well-defined characteristics of their own until someone observes them. For many scientists, including Max Planck and Albert Einstein, both pioneers in the history of the quantum, things had gone too far.

To advance their case against the emerging quantum orthodoxy, Einstein devised many hypothetical experiments which tried to show that quantum theory was missing some fundamental point. It was mainly down to his old friend Niels Bohr to answer these criticisms, and answer them, without exception, he did.

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