Abstract
Foundational attitudes towards quantum theory have recently thrown off much of the old philosophical baggage largely associated with Niels Bohr to which Einstein famously objected, including the central ‘collapse of the wavefunction’ concept. A ‘neo-Copenhagen’ interpretation, it is suggested, has arisen. This development is placed in its historical context and contrasted to philosophical allegations of anti-realism. The neo-Copenhagen interpretation remains wedded to Heisenberg's uncertainty and observer-dependent values of particles. However a discussion of Nick Herbert's ‘rainbow analogy’ suggests that subatomic particles are emergent from a ‘nonlocal’ level of reality outside the domain of space and time. Critical realism recognizes that emergent systems have an irreducibly ontologically character, and in its combination of epistemological relativism and ontological realism, provides a basis for the proposition that realists who support Einstein's objections must now recognize that their realism must be redefined.
Notes
44 CitationBhaskar 1993, 78: ‘It is a (deep but) contingent fact that the world reveals ontological stratification — of many layers of depth, in many different dimensions.’
68 Schlosshauer et al. Citation2013. Thanks to Anindya Bhattacharya for pointing this survey out to me.
75 Castelvecchi 2010, 10.
92 Cox and Forshaw 2011, 189.
93 Wallace 2010, 67; original emphasis.
134 It was Galileo who first discovered that space was relative.
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Peter Stuart Mason
Peter Stuart Mason works for the Socialist Party. He writes occasionally for The Socialist newspaper and Socialism Today on science and the environment and is author of the short polemic, Science, Marxism and the Big Bang (Socialist Publications, 2012).
Correspondence to: Pete Mason, Socialist Party, PO Box 24697, London E11 1YD, UK. Email: [email protected]