Against the Copenhagen Interpretation of Quantum Mechanics

[Daymare17]

Hi, I am a Marxist and I am also very interested in science. The site of my tendency recently carried an article about quantum mechanics. It criticises the mystical and irrationalist trends in modern science in general, and the Copenhagen Interpretation of quantum mechanics in particular. Can any of you criticise the article? I'm sure it has very interesting points even for anyone who's not into politics at all.

 

Excerpts:

 

Modern physicists have been forced to accept that concepts which had previously been considered separate must be linked, that they can not be thought of as separate but are different yet interconnected aspects of the physical world. In particular, the physicist’s concept of motion has to be extended to acknowledge the simultaneous wave and particle aspects of matter. When matter moves, a physicist can describe the process by momentum, which is the mass of the moving body times its velocity. A wave, on the other hand, is a different type of physical process. It is a disturbance, of the surface of a body of water or of an electrical field for example, and is a process in which energy moves. A physicist might describe a wave by its wavelength, the distance from one peak of the disturbance to the next. Momentum and wavelength are two quite distinct abstractions used to describe two different processes. Yet after Einstein’s work on the photoelectric effect, and after the theoretical work of the founders of quantum mechanics, physicists were forced to accept that momentum, a characteristic of matter behaving like a particle, is directly related to wavelength, a characteristic of matter behaving like a wave.

 

Much of the confusion surrounding quantum mechanics, added to and propagated by Bohr and Heisenberg, relates to the insistence that concepts such as wave and particle, or momentum and wavelength, must be kept separate - “we have two contradictory pictures of reality” as Einstein put it. This confusion is deeply rooted in the rejection – or the lack of awareness - of dialectics by modern scientists. “On the one hand, but then on the other” says the academic as he agonises over his choice between apparently contradictory options, wondering why the world is always like this. That apparently contradictory properties can be present simultaneously is not only possible but also universal. Light and dark, hot and cold, north and south, wave and particle, an inevitable and unavoidable combination, the existence of one being impossible without the other, and out of which comes change and motion...

 

In the two slit experiment it is not possible to predict where the particle will go after the slits, other than on average. There is an indeterminancy, in the sense that the precise trajectory cannot be predicted in advance. But this is different from acausality. The particle arrives where it does as a causal chain of events. The apparatus fires the particle at the slits; it passes through one of them; it arrives at the detecting screen. And there are many examples in nature of causal but non-deterministic systems. A toboggan sliding down a bumpy hill arrives at a position at the bottom which is impossible to predict beforehand. If it starts from a slightly different position at the top it will arrive at a widely different position at the bottom. Unpredictability does not preclude causality. In fact modern science is beginning to understand that often causality is expressed through unpredictability – that necessity is expressed through chance:

 

“At first sight, we seem to be lost in a vast number of accidents. But this confusion is only apparent. The accidental phenomena which constantly flash in and out of existence, like the waves on the face of an ocean, express a deeper process, which is not accidental but necessary. At a decisive point, this necessity reveals itself through accident.”

 

 

http://www.marxist.com/quantum-mechanics-copenhagen130705.htm

[swansont]

Hi' date=' I am a Marxist and I am also very interested in science. The site of my tendency recently carried an article about quantum mechanics. It criticises the mystical and irrationalist trends in modern science in general, and the Copenhagen Interpretation of quantum mechanics in particular. Can any of you criticise the article? I'm sure it has very interesting points even for anyone who's not into politics at all.

[/quote']

 

 

Technically it seems OK (though I only skimmed the whole article), but not in the analysis and interpretation. "despite its successes it remains an intensely controversial theory. It suggests that very small objects such as electrons or photons (particles of light) behave in ways that contradict the common sense ideas and physical intuition that derive from the world of objects that we see around us." for example, is crap. Though I'm sure it's confusing to a political reporter, and does go against intuition, that does not make it controversial, much less "intensely controversial." I don't think you'll find anybody in the community disputing whether atoms can be made to interfere.

 

 

It's also weak in the tenuous connection to politics, which I find not at all surprising. Much like the justification of social Darwinism.