What's wrong with this quantum world, February 2004

Abstract

If you ask Google to search for “no quantum world,” you will get nearly 300 hits. They all give the following quotation (or recognizable corruptions of it): There is no quantum world. There is only an abstract quantum physical description. It is wrong to think that the task of physics is to find out how nature is. Physics concerns what we can say about nature. Over 90% of them attribute the statement to Niels Bohr, with phrases like “Bohr's dictum …,” “Bohr insisted that …,” “Bohr proclaimed …,” “Niels Bohr said, in a frequently quoted passage …,” “Niels Bohr wrote [my emphasis] …,” and even “Explain and evaluate Bohr's philosophy of quantum theory with reference to his assertion ….” Here is yet another example of the power of the internet to enrich our knowledge. There is only one problem. Bohr, who took writing very seriously indeed, never published such an assertion in any of his writings, although he repeatedly refined, reformulated, and often simply repeated his position on the philosophical foundations of the quantum theory. The statement actually comes from an essay by Aage Petersen, “The Philosophy of Niels Bohr” [1], which he published in the Bulletin of the Atomic Scientists shortly after Bohr's death. Petersen introduced the words with When asked whether the algorithm of quantum mechanics could be considered as somehow mirroring an underlying quantum world, Bohr would answer … So what may now be the most celebrated of all Bohr quotations on the nature of the quantum theory is at best an attempt by a close associate to characterize Bohr's general response to the highly problematic notion of a “quantum world,” written too late for Bohr to respond. When you ask Google to list only those pages that also mention the actual author of the words, Petersen, the number of hits drops from 286 to 18. The status of this “quotation” as hearsay is in danger of being lost. I'm particularly sensitive to this risk because in the 1980s I used to enjoy giving physics colloquia on Bell's theorem and its implications for our understanding of quantum mechanics. I was always fond of Petersen's recollection of what Bohr used to say, and I felt that his formulation captured something important about the situation revealed by Bell's theorem.