Living Opponents of the Copenhagen Interpretation

[Nugatory]

Thus, as Atyy says, "It is impossible to know both the position and momentum of a quantum particle, because it does not and cannot have both position and momentum simultaneously." But originally, for the founders of QM, that was just an extension of the empirical criteria of meaning to the theoretical limit of the measurements of that day (and, as I understand it, was directly related to the technological limits of spectroscopes of that time).

That is simply incorrect. You will hear it a lot from people who have read too many superficial treatments of the history and haven't made the effort to (in Bhobba's apt phrase) "nut it out for themselves", but that doesn't make it correct.

In fact, the impossibility of making that simultaneous determination of position and momentum (or any other pair of non-commuting observables) appeared in the first mathematical formulations of QM. Heisenberg initially described this as "measuring one disturbs the other" but even then his argument was based on general principles and had nothing to do with technological limits.

I just mean careful, accurate, wise thinking about the principles that underlie science, and on questions such as the ones that we're discussing, and those that have become deeply intertwined in physics and particularly QM.

A necessary prerequisite for such thinking is to understand the way in which the uncertainty principle follows from the postulates of QM. Once you've done that, you can consider whether the problem lies in the postulates or in an error in the mathematical derivation from those postulates.

 

[Nugatory]

Bhobba has given OP a decent reading list. I'm closing this thread now.