I am trying to imagine the difficulties that translator J.B. Sykes encountered when working on Erhard Scheibe’s The Logical Analysis of Quantum Mechanics from 1973. The translation process extended through to the Danish of Bohr himself, the primary subject of Scheibe’s book (likely in German). The complexities of describing the evolving theory and the strange logic that envelops quantum physics were clearly apparent in Scheibe’s project. About Bohr’s writing, he reports:
Bohr’s mode of expression and manner of argument are individualistic sometimes to the point of being repellent…”
and:
Thus, although Bohr himself testifies to his wish to present his view at least partly as a complex of causes or a hierarchy of concepts and statements having various degrees of priority, there is still good reason to question whether he succeeded in doing so intelligibly.”
But I am not here to further pile on Bohr. New concepts like complementarity were extremely strange. Instead, I want to emphasize the important role that philosophy can have in the analysis of arguments and conceptual structures. Quantum mechanics remains a unique example of something that is both the basis for the reality we observe and yet completely alien to the everyday reality we encounter at human scale. It needs contextualization in order to make progress. From “spooky” action-at-a-distance to Everett’s many-worlds interpretation, quantum logic is a thus-far intractably weird thing. As a philosophical topic for analysis, it escapes the complaint of being a purely mental or a priori construct of pure thought, the kinds of omphaloskepsis that extend back to Classical Greece.
I was considering all this in the context of much discussion of value hierarchies in fields like philosophy that have been circulating on Substack.… Read the rest
