Related papers: When champions meet: Rethinking the Bohr--Einstein…
Niels Bohr's doctrine of the primacy of "classical concepts" is arguably his most criticized and misunderstood view. We present a new, careful historical analysis that makes clear that Bohr's doctrine was primarily an epistemological…
Even if Einstein brought major contributions as a founder of quantum mechanics, he remained deeply unsatisfied with the bases of this structure he knew to be so efficient for physics. His critics are often known through his numerous…
In this paper I show that, while Einstein and Bohm both pursued a deterministic description of quantum mechanics, their philosophical concern was in fact primarily realism and not determinism. Their alleged firm adherence to determinism is…
It is now widely accepted that environmental entanglement and the resulting decoherence processes play a crucial role in the quantum-to-classical transition and the emergence of "classicality" from quantum mechanics. To this extent,…
The Bohr--Einstein debate is one of the more remarkable protracted intellectual exchanges in the history of physics. Its influence has been lasting: One of the few clear patterns in a 2013 survey about quantum foundations was that the…
The assumptions added by Bohr and concerning the Hilbert space (formed by all solutions of Schroedinger equation) changed fundamentally the original physical interpretation of these solutions proposed earlier by Schroedinger. This new…
Einstein's distinction between principle theories and constructive theories is methodological rather than metaphysical. Principle theories such as thermodynamics and relativity articulate empirically distilled constraints that delimit…
A growing number of commentators have, in recent years, noted the important affinities in the views of Immanuel Kant and Niels Bohr. While these commentators are correct, the picture they present of the connections between Bohr and Kant is…
Bohr's interpretation of quantum mechanics has been criticized as incoherent and opportunistic, and based on doubtful philosophical premises. If so Bohr's influence, in the pre-war period of 1927-1939, is the harder to explain, and the…
The only acceptable reason why measurements are irreversible and outcomes definite is the intrinsic definiteness and irreversibility of human sensory experience. While QBists deserve credit for their spirited defense of this position, Niels…
It is known that Einstein's conceptual base for his theory of relativity was the philosophy formulated by Immanuel Kant. Things appear differently to observers in different frames. However, Kant's Ding-an-Sich leads to the existence of the…
Einstein initially objected to the probabilistic aspect of quantum mechanics - the idea that God is playing at dice. Later he changed his ground, and focussed instead on the point that the Copenhagen Interpretation leads to what Einstein…
Quantum mechanics challenges classical intuitions of space, time, and causality via the superposition principle, which allows systems to exist in multiple states simultaneously. Niels Bohr addressed these paradoxes through his…
In 1930 Einstein argued against consistency of the time-energy uncertainty relation by discussing a thought experiment involving a measurement of mass of the box which emitted a photon. Bohr seemingly triumphed over Einstein by arguing that…
This article explores the following methodological principle for theory construction in physics: if an ontological theory predicts two scenarios that are ontologically distinct but empirically indiscernible, then this theory should be…
No, but the paper argues that Bohr understood his correspondence principle, or at least an aspect of that principle expressed by the notion of rational generalization, as grounded in Hankel's principle of permanence, adapted to new…
The spectacular successes of quantum physics have made it a commonplace to assert that we live in a quantum world. This idea seems to imply a kind of "quantum fundamentalism" according to which everything in the universe (if not the…
Einstein's article on the EPR paradox is the most cited of his works, but not many know that it was not fully representative of the way he thought about the incompleteness of the quantum formalism. Indeed, his main worry was not…
At the 1927 Como conference Bohr spoke the now famous words "It is wrong to think that the task of physics is to find out how nature is. Physics concerns what we can say about nature." However, if the Copenhagen interpretation really holds…
In this paper I present and critically discuss the main strategies that Bohr used and could have used to fend off the charge that his interpretation does not provide a clear-cut distinction between the classical and the quantum domain. In…