Intertheory Relations (III)

Abstract

No other physical theory, including Einstein’s General Theory, has been, and still is, more often and more thoroughly misrepresented than QM. Different causes have conspired to produce, not one or two, but a confusing wealth of such misrepresentations. Some of them originate in physical misinterpretations (‘matter waves’, ‘pilot waves’), some in the vagaries and heuristics of the historical development (‘duality’), some in bad philosophy (‘uncertainty relations’), some in the normal difficulty of finding an appropriate new theoretical language for what cannot properly be expressed in the old one (‘statistical interpretation’). Most of these early misinterpretations and misrepresentations have died out or have been corrected (transition probabilities instead of statistic distributions), but some still linger on, and, worse still, new ones have arisen and are still arising. On the semantic level we were offered ‘causal interpretations’ involving ‘hidden parameters’ and/or ‘quantum potentials’ — ghosts that never appear (except on paper), and, as the latest cry, ‘Q-densities’ — revived ghosts in a ‘Ghost-Free Axiomatization’. On the axiomatic or semi-axiomatic level we were offered ‘principles’ or ‘approaches’ such as ‘Principle of Indeterminacy’, ‘Principle of Superposition of States’, ‘Space-Time Approach’, ‘Differential-Space Theory’, to mention but a few of them: to write the whole story of misinterpretations and misrepresentations would fill a book or two.