vanhees71 said:
The problem with Bohr is that he is so unclear in his writing that it invites such "philosophing" about "what might the author have wanted to say", and that's why QT till today is often displayed as something mystic. I find Bohr' and Heisenberg's writings did a bad job in "interpreting QT", because they were too philosophical rather than to wrap off all the dust of the unclear quarter of a century of "old quantum theory", where you had no clear picture of how to describe "quantum phenomena", leading to indeed vague and inconsistent pictures like "wave-particle duality", which was substituted by Bohr just by the even more obscure "complemantarity principle". I think with modern QT there's no need for such philosophical distortions of a very elegant and clear mathematical formulation which just does what all deep physical theories do, i.e., summarizing many empirical facts into a scheme of a few generally valid basic principles, with which all these and (hopefully) many to be discovered phenomena in the future can be described.
I was "surprised" how my conversation with WernerQH went. I remembered him as someone with whom I had constructive and interesting exchanges in the past. So I went back and read some of his early posts and our exchanges. Conclusion: He has not changed, what is different is the current context. That context is set by DrChinese rejecting Bohr's analysis and understanding of quantum phenomena, and then vanhees71 accidentally joining him by disqualifying Bohr's explanations as mere philosophy.
gentzen said:
Well, the quest for unification is not my quest. I guess my quest is just to be able to communicate (about physics), without too much appeal to authority.
The current state of quantum phyics is such that some appeal to authority is still needed. And you cannot just replace Bohr by Ballentine (or Peres) as "your authority," because (1) they are not accepted by sufficiently many people as authority and (2) they never accepted their status as authority, and hence did not act and write in a way that would make them suitable authorities.
It is wrong to see the debate between Einstein and Bohr as a quibble about philosophy. Maybe Bohr's complementarity was a philosophical concept brought forward in the hope that "mathematical" scientific success could be transfered to "non-mathematical" disciplines like Biology. That hope partially became true because of people like Max Dellbrück encouraged by Bohr, but complementarity itself was a failure in that respect.
But Einstein did not attack complementarity. He fought for physical concepts and physical intuition, and Bohr did exactly the same. Bohr's physical intuition is not philosophy, even if he was bad at explaining it. And he sure wrote problematic philosophical texts, like:
Bohr (1958) Quantum Physics and Philosophy Causality and Complementarity said:
A new epoch in physical science was inaugurated, however, by Planck's discovery of the elementary quantum of action, which revealed a feature of wholeness inherent in atomic processes, going far beyond the ancient idea of the limited divisibility of matter.
There is
wholeness in Biology, and maybe this explains why it was a "non-mathematical" discipline, because how can you analyse something which cannot be decomposed? What we have in physics is actually contextuality (not
wholeness), which yields to mathematical analysis without much resistance.
Just because Bohr's writting was sometimes hard to understand doesn't mean that it was philosophy. Same for Einstein's hole argument in general relativity. Just because it is hard to understand doesn't mean that it would be philosophy instead of physics.