Niels Bohr
Quantum physics

There has been much subsequent debate and discussion about Bohr's views and philosophy of quantum mechanics. Regarding his ontological interpretation of the quantum world, Bohr has been seen as an anti-realist, an instrumentalist, a phenomenological realist or some other kind of realist. Furthermore, though some have seen Bohr as being a subjectivist or a positivist, most philosophers agree that this is a misunderstanding of Bohr as he never argued for verificationism or for the idea that the subject had a direct impact on the outcome of a measurement.

Bohr has often been quoted saying that there is "no quantum world" but only an "abstract quantum physical description". This was not publicly said by Bohr, but rather a private statement attributed to Bohr by Aage Petersen in a reminiscence after his death. N. David Mermin recalled Victor Weisskopf declaring that Bohr wouldn't have said anything of the sort and exclaiming, "Shame on Aage Petersen for putting those ridiculous words in Bohr's mouth!"

Numerous scholars have argued that the philosophy of Immanuel Kant had a strong influence on Bohr. Like Kant, Bohr thought distinguishing between the subject's experience and the object was an important condition for attaining knowledge. This can only be done through the use of causal and spatial-temporal concepts to describe the subject's experience. Thus, according to Jan Faye, Bohr thought that it is because of "classical" concepts like "space", "position", "time", "causation", and "momentum" that one can talk about objects and their objective existence. Bohr held that basic concepts like "time" are built in to our ordinary language and that the concepts of classical physics are merely a refinement of them. Therefore, for Bohr, classical concepts need to be used to describe experiments that deal with the quantum world. Bohr writes:

he account of all evidence must be expressed in classical terms. The argument is simply that by the word 'experiment' we refer to a situation where we can tell to others what we have done and what we have learned and that, therefore, the account of the experimental arrangement and of the results of the observations must be expressed in unambiguous language with suitable application of the terminology of classical physics (APHK, p. 39).

According to Faye, there are various explanations for why Bohr believed that classical concepts were necessary for describing quantum phenomena. Faye groups explanations into five frameworks: empiricism (i.e. logical positivism); Kantianism (or Neo-Kantian models of epistemology); Pragmatism (which focus on how human beings experientially interact with atomic systems according to their needs and interests); Darwinianism (i.e. we are adapted to use classical type concepts, which Léon Rosenfeld said that we evolved to use); and Experimentalism (which focuses strictly on the function and outcome of experiments that thus must be described classically). These explanations are not mutually exclusive, and at times Bohr seems to emphasize some of these aspects while at other times he focuses on other elements.

According to Faye "Bohr thought of the atom as real. Atoms are neither heuristic nor logical constructions." However, according to Faye, he did not believe "that the quantum mechanical formalism was true in the sense that it gave us a literal ('pictorial') rather than a symbolic representation of the quantum world." Therefore, Bohr's theory of complementarity "is first and foremost a semantic and epistemological reading of quantum mechanics that carries certain ontological implications". As Faye explains, Bohr's indefinability thesis is that

he truth conditions of sentences ascribing a certain kinematic or dynamic value to an atomic object are dependent on the apparatus involved, in such a way that these truth conditions have to include reference to the experimental setup as well as the actual outcome of the experiment.

Faye notes that Bohr's interpretation makes no reference to a "collapse of the wave function during measurements" (and indeed, he never mentioned this idea). Instead, Bohr "accepted the Born statistical interpretation because he believed that the ψ -function has only a symbolic meaning and does not represent anything real". Since for Bohr, the ψ -function is not a literal pictorial representation of reality, there can be no real collapse of the wavefunction.

A much debated point in recent literature is what Bohr believed about atoms and their reality and whether they are something else than what they seem to be. Some like Henry Folse argue that Bohr saw a distinction between observed phenomena and a transcendental reality. Jan Faye disagrees with this position and holds that for Bohr, the quantum formalism and complementarity was the only thing we could say about the quantum world and that "there is no further evidence in Bohr's writings indicating that Bohr would attribute intrinsic and measurement-independent state properties to atomic objects in addition to the classical ones being manifested in measurement."
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