OK, I managed to scramble things up nicely in my previous post. It was Planck, not Heisenberg, who was a philosophical ally of Einstein. If I recall correctly, it was Planck who nominated Einstein for membership in the Berlin Academy of Sciences, partly because Planck liked the realist viewpoint underlying Einstein's theorizing. Einstein himself doesn't appear to have been much interested in philosophy per se, but was drawn to a realist view instinctively.
Heisenberg was a student of Bohr, and as such was influenced by what Jaki calls the Copenhagen School of quantum mechanics. Jaki finds a common thread running from the Idealism of Berkeley through Kant to the Copenhagen School, and that common thread is a tendency to argue against the reality of the external world. The Copenhagen School blundered into this view through some sloppy analysis of Heisenberg's Principle of Uncertainty. The Heisenberg Principle is valid as physics, where it is used to describe the operational impossibility of exactly knowing "conjugate variables" such as motion/position, but the problem arises when the Copenhagen School switches the meaning of "exactly knowing" from an operational physics claim to an ontological philosophical claim. By switching categories from the operational to the ontological the Copenhagen School calls into question not just our ability to measure the world, but whether that world is really there at all. Another result of this is that some Copenhagen School adherents argue that entire universes can pop into and out of existence before you can measure them. |
