May 24, 2024 04:34 PM
https://aeon.co/essays/how-soviet-commun...tum-theory
When quantum mechanics posed a threat to the Marxist doctrine of materialism, communist physicists sought to reconcile the two...
EXCERPTS: Niels Bohr emphasised that complementarity did not deny the existence of an objective quantum reality lying beneath the phenomena. But it did deny that we can discover anything meaningful about this. ... Complementarity also fell foul of the principal political ideologies that, in different ways, dominated human affairs from the early 1930s...
[...] In Marxist philosophy, the method of studying and apprehending both social and physical phenomena is dialectical, and the interpretation of natural phenomena is firmly materialistic. It was not enough just to interpret the world, Marx claimed. Philosophers must also seek to change it, and this could not be done in a world built only from perceptions and ideas. Any philosophy that sought to disconnect us from material reality, by reducing the world to mere sensation and experience, posed a threat to Marxism.
[...] Vladimir Lenin, who had led the Bolshevik Party in the October Revolution of 1917, was a dogmatic advocate of the materialist worldview expounded by the German philosophers Karl Marx and Friedrich Engels...
[...] In Materialism and Empirio-Criticism (1909), Lenin had berated the physicist Ernst Mach and his Russian followers, and the German philosopher Richard Avenarius, who had formulated the positivist doctrine of empirio-criticism. The philosophy of positivism was anathema, as it sought to reduce knowledge of the world to sensory experience. Lenin argued that such thinking led only to a subjective idealism, or even solipsism. To him, this was just so much ‘gibberish’.
Complementarity looked just like the kind of positivist gibberish that Lenin had sought to annihilate. A reality accessible only in the form of quantum probabilities did not suit the needs of the official philosophy of Soviet communists. It appeared to undermine orthodox materialism.
[...] As the 1930s progressed towards world war, many Western intellectuals had embraced communism as the only perceived alternative to the looming threat of Nazism. ... David Bohm’s communist affiliations led the director of the Manhattan Project, Leslie Groves, to deny him the security clearance necessary to join the project.
[...] Bohm had by this time moved to Princeton University in New Jersey. Einstein ... asked to meet with him sometime in the spring of 1951. The meeting re-awakened the Marxist materialist in Bohm...
[...] Einstein was known for his pacifist and Leftist inclinations. ... Both of Einstein’s assistants were sympathetic to the Soviet cause. Six months after the publication of the EPR paper, Rosen asked Einstein to recommend him for a job in the Soviet Union. ... Rosen was at first delighted with his new home, and soon he had a son. ‘I hope,’ Einstein wrote in congratulation, ‘that he too can help in furthering the great cultural mission that the new Russia has undertaken with such energy.’ But by October 1938 Rosen was back in the US, having discovered that his research did not prosper in the people’s paradise.
[...] Bohm examined the EPR experiment in considerable detail. He developed an alternative that offered the prospect of translation from a thought experiment into a real one. ... inspired by Bohm, the Irish physicist John Bell also pushed back against complementarity...
[...] It began to dawn on the wider scientific community that entanglement and nonlocality were real phenomena, leading to speculations on the possibility of building a quantum computer, and on the use of entangled particles in a system of quantum cryptography...
[...] Soviet physicist-philosophers lent their support by finding positivist tendencies in Bohr’s teaching in conflict with dialectical materialism. Some sought an alternative materialistic interpretation. ... Bohm laboured at a time when there was little appetite for what many physicists judged to be philosophical, and therefore irrelevant, foundational questions. It says much about Bohm’s commitment that he resisted the temptation to leave such questions to play out in the theatre of the mind. The Marxist in Bohm sought not only to show that a materialistic alternative was possible, but also to find a way to bring the arguments into the real world of the laboratory.
It was not enough just to interpret the world. Bohm also sought to change it... (MORE - missing details)
When quantum mechanics posed a threat to the Marxist doctrine of materialism, communist physicists sought to reconcile the two...
EXCERPTS: Niels Bohr emphasised that complementarity did not deny the existence of an objective quantum reality lying beneath the phenomena. But it did deny that we can discover anything meaningful about this. ... Complementarity also fell foul of the principal political ideologies that, in different ways, dominated human affairs from the early 1930s...
[...] In Marxist philosophy, the method of studying and apprehending both social and physical phenomena is dialectical, and the interpretation of natural phenomena is firmly materialistic. It was not enough just to interpret the world, Marx claimed. Philosophers must also seek to change it, and this could not be done in a world built only from perceptions and ideas. Any philosophy that sought to disconnect us from material reality, by reducing the world to mere sensation and experience, posed a threat to Marxism.
[...] Vladimir Lenin, who had led the Bolshevik Party in the October Revolution of 1917, was a dogmatic advocate of the materialist worldview expounded by the German philosophers Karl Marx and Friedrich Engels...
[...] In Materialism and Empirio-Criticism (1909), Lenin had berated the physicist Ernst Mach and his Russian followers, and the German philosopher Richard Avenarius, who had formulated the positivist doctrine of empirio-criticism. The philosophy of positivism was anathema, as it sought to reduce knowledge of the world to sensory experience. Lenin argued that such thinking led only to a subjective idealism, or even solipsism. To him, this was just so much ‘gibberish’.
Complementarity looked just like the kind of positivist gibberish that Lenin had sought to annihilate. A reality accessible only in the form of quantum probabilities did not suit the needs of the official philosophy of Soviet communists. It appeared to undermine orthodox materialism.
[...] As the 1930s progressed towards world war, many Western intellectuals had embraced communism as the only perceived alternative to the looming threat of Nazism. ... David Bohm’s communist affiliations led the director of the Manhattan Project, Leslie Groves, to deny him the security clearance necessary to join the project.
[...] Bohm had by this time moved to Princeton University in New Jersey. Einstein ... asked to meet with him sometime in the spring of 1951. The meeting re-awakened the Marxist materialist in Bohm...
[...] Einstein was known for his pacifist and Leftist inclinations. ... Both of Einstein’s assistants were sympathetic to the Soviet cause. Six months after the publication of the EPR paper, Rosen asked Einstein to recommend him for a job in the Soviet Union. ... Rosen was at first delighted with his new home, and soon he had a son. ‘I hope,’ Einstein wrote in congratulation, ‘that he too can help in furthering the great cultural mission that the new Russia has undertaken with such energy.’ But by October 1938 Rosen was back in the US, having discovered that his research did not prosper in the people’s paradise.
[...] Bohm examined the EPR experiment in considerable detail. He developed an alternative that offered the prospect of translation from a thought experiment into a real one. ... inspired by Bohm, the Irish physicist John Bell also pushed back against complementarity...
[...] It began to dawn on the wider scientific community that entanglement and nonlocality were real phenomena, leading to speculations on the possibility of building a quantum computer, and on the use of entangled particles in a system of quantum cryptography...
[...] Soviet physicist-philosophers lent their support by finding positivist tendencies in Bohr’s teaching in conflict with dialectical materialism. Some sought an alternative materialistic interpretation. ... Bohm laboured at a time when there was little appetite for what many physicists judged to be philosophical, and therefore irrelevant, foundational questions. It says much about Bohm’s commitment that he resisted the temptation to leave such questions to play out in the theatre of the mind. The Marxist in Bohm sought not only to show that a materialistic alternative was possible, but also to find a way to bring the arguments into the real world of the laboratory.
It was not enough just to interpret the world. Bohm also sought to change it... (MORE - missing details)