Uncertainty in Bohr's response to the Heisenberg microscope [An article from: Studies in History and Philosophy of Modern Physics] | ![Uncertainty in Bohr's response to the Heisenberg microscope [An article from: Studies in History and Philosophy of Modern Physics]](http://ecx.images-amazon.com/images/I/41Z37478WSL._SL160_.jpg)
 enlarge | Author: S. Tanona
Publisher: Elsevier
Category: Book
Buy New: $5.95
Sales Rank: 4862836
Format: Html
Media: Digital
Publication Date: September 1, 2004
Availability: Available for download now
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Product Description
This digital document is a journal article from Studies in History and Philosophy of Modern Physics, published by Elsevier in 2004. The article is delivered in HTML format and is available in your Amazon.com Media Library immediately after purchase. You can view it with any web browser.
Description:
In this paper, I analyze Bohr's account of the uncertainty relations in Heisenberg's gamma-ray microscope thought experiment and address the question of whether Bohr thought uncertainty was epistemological or ontological. Bohr's account seems to allow that the electron being investigated has definite properties which we cannot measure, but other parts of his Como lecture seem to indicate that he thought that electrons are wave-packets which do not have well-defined properties. I argue that his account merges the ontological and epistemological aspects of uncertainty. However, Bohr reached this conclusion not from positivism, as perhaps Heisenberg did, but because he was led to that conclusion by his understanding of the physics in terms of nonseparability and the correspondence principle. Bohr argued that the wave theory from which he derived the uncertainty relations was not to be taken literally, but rather symbolically, as an expression of the limited applicability of classical concepts to parts of entangled quantum systems. Complementarity and uncertainty are consequences of the formalism, properly interpreted, and not something brought to the physics from external philosophical views.
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