The Observable: Heisenberg’s Philosophy of Quantum Mechanics

228 Pages·2015·1.04 MB·English

by  Patrick Aidan Heelan

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Patrick Aidan Heelan’s The Observable offers the reader a completely articulated
development of his 1965 philosophy of quantum physics, Quantum Mechanics and
Objectivity. In this previously unpublished study dating back more than a half a century,
Heelan brings his background as both a physicist and a philosopher to his reflections on PATRICK AIDAN HEELAN
Werner Heisenberg’s physical philosophy. Including considerably broader connections
to the contributions of Niels Bohr, Wolfgang Pauli, and Albert Einstein, this study also
reflects Heelan’s experience in Eugene Wigner’s laboratory at Princeton along with his
reflections on working with Erwin Schrödinger dating from Heelan’s years at the Insti-
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tute for Advanced Cosmology in Dublin.
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THE OBSERVABLE
A contribution to continental philosophy of science, the phenomenological and her- E
meneutic resources applied in this book to the physical and ontological paradoxes of
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quantum physics, especially in connection with laboratory science and measurement,
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theory and model making, will enrich students of the history of science as well as those
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interested in different approaches to the historiography of science. University courses
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in the philosophy of physics will find this book indispensable as a resource and invalu-
R Heisenberg’s Philosophy of Quantum Mechanics
able for courses in the history of science.
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A
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Patrick Aidan Heelan (1926–2015), a Jesuit priest, held
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a Ph.D. in geophysics and seismology (St. Louis Uni- E
versity, 1952) and a Ph.D. in philosophy (Catholic Uni-

versity Leuven, 1964). He joined Fordham’s philosophy

department (1965), became chair of philosophy at Stony

Brook (1970), served as Georgetown University’s Execu- H
tive Vice President (1992–1995), and taught philosophy E
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(1995–2013). He is author of Quantum Mechanics and Objectivity (1965) and Space-
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Perception and the Philosophy of Science (1983). A
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Babette Babich is Professor of Philosophy at Fordham University in New York City. She
is author of Un politique brisé. Le souci d’autrui, l’humanisme, et les juifs chez Heideg-
ger (2015) and The Hallelujah Effect: Philosophical Reflections on Music, Performance
Practice, and Technology (2013) in addition to essays and monographs on philosophy of
science, politics, ethics, and aesthetics.
www.peterlang.com
P
E
TE MICHEL BITBOL
R L FOREWORD BY
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HISTORY AND PHILOSOPHY OF SCIENCE NG
BABETTE BABICH
Heresy, Crossroads, and Intersections EDITED WITH A FOREWORD BY
THE OBSERVABLE
HISTORY AND PHILOSOPHY OF SCIENCE
Heresy, Crossroads, and Intersections

Paolo Palmieri
General Editor

Vol. 1

This book is a volume in a Peter Lang monograph series.
Every volume is peer reviewed and meets
the highest quality standards for content and production.

PETER LANG
New York  Bern  Frankfurt  Berlin
Brussels  Vienna  Oxford  Warsaw
PATRICK AIDAN HEELAN

THE OBSERVABLE
Heisenberg’s Philosophy of
Quantum Mechanics

MICHEL BITBOL
FOREWORD BY

EDITED WITH A FOREWORD BY BABETTE BABICH

PETER LANG
New York  Bern  Frankfurt  Berlin
Brussels  Vienna  Oxford  Warsaw
Library of Congress Cataloging-in-Publication Data
Heelan, Patrick A., author.
The observable: Heisenberg’s philosophy of quantum mechanics / Patrick Aidan Heelan;
edited with a foreword by Babette Babich; foreword by Michel Bitbol.
pages cm — (History and philosophy of science: heresy, crossroads, and intersections; 1)
Includes bibliographical references and index.
1. Heisenberg uncertainty principle. 2. Quantum theory. I. Babich, Babette E., editor.
II. Title. III. Series: History and philosophy of science; 1.
QC174.17.H4H44 530.12—dc23 2015025394
ISBN 978-1-4331-3062-5 (hardcover)
ISBN 978-1-4539-1713-8 (e-book)
ISSN 2376-6336 (print)
ISSN 2376-6344 (online)

Bibliographic information published by Die Deutsche Nationalbibliothek.
Die Deutsche Nationalbibliothek lists this publication in the “Deutsche
Nationalbibliografie”; detailed bibliographic data are available
on the Internet at http://dnb.d-nb.de/.

Cover image: Paul Cezanne (1839–1906), The Black Clock. Private Collection.
Photo credit: Foto Marburg/Art Resource, NY

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All rights reserved.
Reprint or reproduction, even partially, in all forms such as microfilm,
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Table of Contents
Foreword by Michel Bitbol vii
Foreword by Babette Babich xv
Author’s Foreword xxxi
List of Abbreviations xxxix
Preface (1970) 1
Chapter One: Observation, Description and Ontology: Strategy 5
Chapter Two: Relativity: Model of a Scientific Revolution 15
Chapter Three: Quantum Mechanics 1925: Revolution 29
Chapter Four: Wave Mechanics 1926: Reaction 39
Chapter Five: Search for a Paradigm 43
Chapter Six: The Uncertainty Relations: Paradigm or Ontology of Nature? 47
Chapter Seven: The Philosophical Differences Between Heisenberg and Bohr 53
Chapter Eight: Complementarity 63
Chapter Nine: The Chicago Lectures 1929: Complementarity Adopted 69
Chapter Ten: “Observation” 83
Chapter Eleven: Observation and Description in Quantum Mechanics 93
Chapter Twelve: The a Priori Role of Classical Physics 107
Chapter Thirteen: The Gifford Lectures 1955–56 and the New Aristotelianism 111
Chapter Fourteen: The Logical Status of Potentia 119
vi | the observable
Chapter Fifteen: Objectivity and Realism in Quantum Mechanics 131
Chapter Sixteen: Observation, Description, and Ontology: Summary 139
Bibliography and References 151
Appendix: Correspondence with Professors Werner
Heisenberg and Francis Zucker 159
Patrick Aidan Heelan: Brief Biography Including Select Bibliography 167
Name Index 173
Subject Index 179
Foreword
michel bitbol
This is not an ordinary book on the philosophy of quantum physics. Patrick Heelan
started working with Werner Heisenberg in the early 1960’s while he was associ-
ated with the Edmund Husserl Archives at the University of Leuven in Belgium,
and his research about the meaning of quantum mechanics bears a strong mark of
this immersion in the heartland of phenomenology, hermeneutics and transcen-
dental epistemology. Being a member of the Edmund Husserl Archives at the
Ecole Normale Supérieure, in Paris, France, I can appreciate with a flavor of com-
plicity the depth and extent of this philosophical influence.
About the latter, it must be said that, irrespective of one’s position in the long-
term debate between analytic and “continental” philosophies, and independently of
any judgment about which one of these two philosophical strategies is best suited
for clarifying the meaning of modern physical theories, the “continental” approach
has the advantage of being akin to the one pursued by the creators of quantum
mechanics themselves. Even when they disagreed, the physicists who first elabo-
rated the formalism and tentative interpretations of this theory were debating with
common philosophical references, and with the shared cultural background of a
post-Kantian and neo-Kantian German tradition. Thus, although he criticized
the original Kantian orthodoxy, Einstein was quite impressed by the neo-Kantian
viii | the observable
reading of relativity theories offered by Ernst Cassirer;1 Bohr was exposed to
Kierkegaard’s existential philosophy and to post-Kantian ideas through Harald
Höffding’s lectures;2 and Schrödinger did not hide the breath-taking similarities
between his philosophical ideas and Schopenhauer’s.3 As for Heisenberg, who is
the central figure and theme of Patrick Heelan’s book, he grew in the atmosphere
of a heated debate about Ernst Mach’s positivism,4 he then received a strong
Kantian input from his student Karl-Friedrich von Weizsäcker and from the phi-
losopher Grete Hermann,5 and he finally had a long-standing intellectual relation-
ship with the hermeneutical phenomenologist Martin Heidegger.
The indisputable symptom of a transcendental and phenomenological influ-
ence on both Heisenberg and Heelan can be seen in the unconventional orientation
of their philosophy of physics. Far from restricting their discussion to a metaphysical
speculation about what the world is like according to quantum mechanics, or about
how the symbols of this theory hook on to things out there, they systematically
impose a reflective direction to their philosophical inquiry. They devote most of their
effort to assessing the “indivisibility” of experimental phenomena, underpinned by
the inextricable connections between the quantum mechanical observer (with var-
ious instrumental extensions) and its purported object. These connections in turn
imply an analysis of the instruments, mathematical symbolism and type of language
which are essential to the practice of microphysics. In particular, it is shown that the
observer-object entanglement expresses itself through the context-dependence of
any description of micro-attributes, and through the correlative use of contextual,
rather than universal, languages. As for the statement of contextuality itself, it can
1 Letter of Einstein to Cassirer, June 5, 1920: “I think that your treatise is very well suited to
clarify philosophers’ ideas and knowledge about the physical problem of relativity.” The Col-
lected Papers of Albert Einstein, Volume 10, The Berlin Years: Correspondence, May–December
1920, and Supplementary Correspondence, 1909–1920 (Princeton: Princeton University Press,
2004), 182.
2 Jan Faye, Niels Bohr: His Heritage and Legacy (Dordrecht: Kluwer, 1991).
3 Cf. Erwin Schrödinger, My View of the World (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press,
1951); Michel Bitbol, Schrödinger’s Philosophy of Quantum Mechanics, (Dordrecht: Kluwer,
1996).
4 Werner Heisenberg, Physics and Beyond (New York: Harper & Row, 1971), Chapter III.
5 Grete Hermann, Les fondemements philosophiques de la mécanique quantique (Paris: Vrin,
1996), French translation of Hermann, Die naturphilosophischen Grundlagen der Quanten-
mechanik, Abhandlungen der Fries’schen Schule, N. F. Band 6, Heft 2: 69–152 (Heidel-
berg: Springer, Sonderdruck bei Hirtzel, 1935).
foreword by michel bitbol | ix
only be made by way of a meta-contextual language6 which is consciously adopted
throughout the book.
Heelan’s analysis of the observer-object complex accordingly develops into
the idea of a hermeneutic circle, which is a mutual relation between (i) a set of con-
textual preconceptions (about a text or a domain of scientific investigation), and
(ii) the way preconceptions modulate the statement of those facts which could
be used to test them. Here, the concept of a hermeneutic circle is generalized in
a Heideggerian spirit so that the fabric of our measuring apparatuses, their scale,
the way we interpret their indications, and even the whole “life world of human
scientific culture,”7 partake of the contextual preconceptions of inquiry. From that
point on, it becomes clear that focusing attention exclusively onto the hypothetical
object of physics or onto the terms that are employed to denote it would be naive,
since the concept of this object emerges from the hermeneutic circle of our investi-
gation process. The belief that remaining forgetful of the course of and the instru-
ments of research is harmless for our understanding of physics can be ascribed to
a remarkable historical circumstance that enabled the rise of classical science, but
is now obsolete. Indeed, at this early stage of the science of nature, the knowing
subject could be shrunk into an almost invisible origin of spatial coordinates, and
ignored straightaway.8 As a consequence, the relation between subject and object
was reduced to a sort of “epistemological parallelism,”9 in which a ghost-like sub-
ject faithfully expressed (but did not engage in) the physical processes. And the
hermeneutical process of research could be oversimplified into a transparent read-
ing of what Galileo called the “grand book (of) the universe.”10
At this point, however, another pitfall must be avoided. Let’s accept that, in
the quantum domain, the subject must be construed as “embodied,” thus estab-
lishing a kind of material continuity between it and the micro-object of study.
This does not entail that the subject, together with its instrumental extensions,
6 Patrick Aidan Heelan, TO Chapter I (the capital letters TO abbreviate the title of the
current book: The Observable); Heelan, “Quantum Logic and Classical Logic: Their
Respective Roles,” Synthese, 22 (1970): 3–33. Also, Michel Bitbol, Mécanique quantique:
une introduction philosophique (Paris: Flammarion, 1996); Bitbol, “Quantum mechanics as
generalized theory of probability,” Collapse, 8 (2014): 87–121.
7 Heelan, TO, Introduction, xxxiv.
8 Hermann Weyl, “The coordinate system is, as it were, the residue of the annihilation of the
ego.” Philosophy of Mathematics and Natural Science (Princeton: Princeton University Press,
2009), 123.
9 Heelan, TO Chapter X, 107.
10 Galileo Galilei, The Assayer, in: Stillman Drake, Discoveries and Opinions of Galileo (New
York: Doubleday and Co., 1957), 237.