Sep 24, 2025 05:30 PM
There is no Copenhagen interpretation of quantum mechanics
https://iai.tv/articles/there-is-no-cope..._auid=2020
INTRO: The so-called Copenhagen interpretation has long been taught as quantum physics’ reigning orthodoxy, a neat tale of collapsing wavefunctions and observer-dependent reality. But the history tells a stranger story. Noemi Bolzenetti, Utrecht University Historian and Philosopher of Science, reveals the patchwork of competing ideas, stitched together into a myth that still dominates textbooks and surveys today. Unpacking Bohr and Heisenberg’s actual disagreements reveals not closure, but a richer set of puzzles still waiting to be faced.
EXCERPTS: . . . There is a game with simple rules and an almost guaranteed victory. It is called the strawman game...
[...] As many scholars have argued for more than twenty years, this was not Bohr’s view at all. As Don Howard has maintained, what we call the “Copenhagen interpretation” seems to be, in fact, a hybrid, largely constructed by Heisenberg, reflecting his own perspective rather than Bohr’s...
[...] The Copenhagen interpretation has become a ghost we keep chasing. It is invoked to silence debates, to reassure students, and to provide a tidy narrative about quantum mechanics. Yet what we call the Copenhagen interpretation is a retrospective construction, a hybrid label forged from fragments of different views, convenient for textbooks and surveys but ultimately misleading...
[...] In the end, the story of the Copenhagen interpretation is a cautionary tale about how science and its history are told. ... Quantum mechanics need not be imprisoned by a single mythic narrative, nor must our thinking. Freed from the strawman, we can return to the questions that first animated Bohr, Heisenberg, and their peers, and perhaps discover new answers of our own... (MORE - details)
Negative time observed in photon-atom interaction
https://physicsworld.com/a/negative-time...nteraction
EXCERPT: . . . According to Steinberg, while he and his colleagues previously knew that negative numbers could pop out of the mathematics, they tended to sweep them under the rug and make excuses for them, assuming that while they correctly described the location of a peak, they weren’t physically relevant. “I am now led to revisit this and say: those negative numbers appear to have more physical significance that we would previously have attributed to them,” he tells Physics World. As a result, he hopes to “begin to investigate more deeply what we think the meaning of a ‘negative time’ is”.
Jonte Hance, a quantum physicist at Newcastle University, UK, who was not involved in this research, warns that interpreting negative time too literally can lead to paradoxes that aren’t necessary for the physics to work. Nevertheless, he says, the “anomalous” values recorded in the weak measurement “point to something interesting and quantum happening”.
Hance explains that in his view, a negative value for the mean atomic excitation time for transmitted photons implies contextuality – a property of quantum systems whereby measuring the system in different ways can make it look like it has incompatible properties if we assume that measuring the system does nothing to it. “Contextuality seems to be one of the tell-tale signs a quantum scenario may provide us with an advantage at a certain task over all possible classical ways of doing that task,” he says. “And so it makes me excited for what this could be used for.” (MORE - details)
https://iai.tv/articles/there-is-no-cope..._auid=2020
INTRO: The so-called Copenhagen interpretation has long been taught as quantum physics’ reigning orthodoxy, a neat tale of collapsing wavefunctions and observer-dependent reality. But the history tells a stranger story. Noemi Bolzenetti, Utrecht University Historian and Philosopher of Science, reveals the patchwork of competing ideas, stitched together into a myth that still dominates textbooks and surveys today. Unpacking Bohr and Heisenberg’s actual disagreements reveals not closure, but a richer set of puzzles still waiting to be faced.
EXCERPTS: . . . There is a game with simple rules and an almost guaranteed victory. It is called the strawman game...
[...] As many scholars have argued for more than twenty years, this was not Bohr’s view at all. As Don Howard has maintained, what we call the “Copenhagen interpretation” seems to be, in fact, a hybrid, largely constructed by Heisenberg, reflecting his own perspective rather than Bohr’s...
[...] The Copenhagen interpretation has become a ghost we keep chasing. It is invoked to silence debates, to reassure students, and to provide a tidy narrative about quantum mechanics. Yet what we call the Copenhagen interpretation is a retrospective construction, a hybrid label forged from fragments of different views, convenient for textbooks and surveys but ultimately misleading...
[...] In the end, the story of the Copenhagen interpretation is a cautionary tale about how science and its history are told. ... Quantum mechanics need not be imprisoned by a single mythic narrative, nor must our thinking. Freed from the strawman, we can return to the questions that first animated Bohr, Heisenberg, and their peers, and perhaps discover new answers of our own... (MORE - details)
Negative time observed in photon-atom interaction
https://physicsworld.com/a/negative-time...nteraction
EXCERPT: . . . According to Steinberg, while he and his colleagues previously knew that negative numbers could pop out of the mathematics, they tended to sweep them under the rug and make excuses for them, assuming that while they correctly described the location of a peak, they weren’t physically relevant. “I am now led to revisit this and say: those negative numbers appear to have more physical significance that we would previously have attributed to them,” he tells Physics World. As a result, he hopes to “begin to investigate more deeply what we think the meaning of a ‘negative time’ is”.
Jonte Hance, a quantum physicist at Newcastle University, UK, who was not involved in this research, warns that interpreting negative time too literally can lead to paradoxes that aren’t necessary for the physics to work. Nevertheless, he says, the “anomalous” values recorded in the weak measurement “point to something interesting and quantum happening”.
Hance explains that in his view, a negative value for the mean atomic excitation time for transmitted photons implies contextuality – a property of quantum systems whereby measuring the system in different ways can make it look like it has incompatible properties if we assume that measuring the system does nothing to it. “Contextuality seems to be one of the tell-tale signs a quantum scenario may provide us with an advantage at a certain task over all possible classical ways of doing that task,” he says. “And so it makes me excited for what this could be used for.” (MORE - details)
