How Can It Be Like That?

arXiv:2302.00084v1 [physics.hist-ph] 31 Jan 2023

JEFFREY BUB*

Richard Feynman, who received a Nobel prize in 1965 for his contributions to
quantum electrodynamics, famously said that nobody understands quantum mechanics
and cautioned against asking: ‘But how can it be like that?’1 Something about the con-
ceptual foundations of the theory is profoundly puzzling, but just what is so disturbing
is not easy to pin down—this itself is in dispute. Three books by Olival Freire, Adam
Becker, and Philip Ball:

Olival Freire Jr. The Quantum Dissidents: Rebuilding the Foundations of Quantum
Mechanics (1950–1990), Foreword by Silvan S. Schweber. xvi + 356 pp., illus., figs.,
tables, index. Heidelberg: Springer, 2015. $99.00 (cloth). ISBN 978-3-662-44661-4.

Adam Becker. What is Real? The Unfinished Quest for the Meaning of Quantum
Physics. ix + 370 pp., illus., figs., index. New York: Basic Books, 2018. $32.00
(cloth). ISBN 978-0-465-09605-3.

Philip Ball. Beyond Weird: Why Everything You Thought You Knew About Quantum
Physics is Different. 377 pp, illus., figs., index. London: The Bodley Head, 2018.
£17.99 (cloth). ISBN 978-1-847-92457-5.

are about the fascinating story of rival attempts to say how it can be like that and, in
the case of the Freire and Becker books, about the hostility between opposing camps,
which sometimes had devastating consequences for the professional careers of the pro-
tagonists.
The story begins with the publication in 1925 of Werner Heisenberg’s breakthrough
paper ‘On the quantum-theoretical re-interpretation (‘Umdeutung’) of kinematical and
mechanical relations’ in Zeitschrift für Physik. Shortly afterwards, Heisenberg wrote
to Wolfgang Pauli (July 9, 1925):2
All of my meagre efforts go toward killing off and suitably replacing the
concept of the orbital paths that one cannot observe.
* Department of Philosophy, Institute for Physical Science and Technology & Joint Center for Quantum
Information and Computer Science, University of Maryland, College Park, MD.
1 Richard Feynman, The Character of Physical Law. The Messenger Lectures, Cornell, 1964. Cambridge:

MIT Press, 1965; p. 129.

2 Quoted in David C. Cassidy, Uncertainty: The Life and Science of Werner Heisenberg. New York: W.H.

Freeman, 1992; p. 197.

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The orbital paths Heisenberg was referring to were the ‘stationary states’ of electrons
revolving around a central nucleus in Bohr’s theory of the atom. Bohr associated elec-
trons jumping between these fixed orbits with photons emitted or absorbed by an atom,
with discrete frequencies corresponding to the observed lines or gaps in atomic spectra.
Heisenberg thought Bohr’s orbits, which conflicted with classical electrodynamics as
well as classical mechanics, were unphysical. His aim was to get rid of the orbits by
replacing classical mechanics with ‘a theoretical quantum mechanics . . . in which only
relations between observable quantities occur.’3
The popular story is that he accomplished this by the extraordinary manoeuvre of
‘re-interpreting’ classical mechanical quantities like position and momentum as oper-
ations represented by arrays, which Max Born identified as matrices when Heisenberg
sent him a draft of the paper. The result of applying an operation A followed by an oper-
ation B can differ from the result of applying the operations in the reverse order, which
is to say that the re-interpreted matrix quantities needn’t commute. The actual history
of the transition from the commutative physical quantities of classical mechanics to the
noncommutative algebra of operators representing ‘observables’ in quantum mechan-
ics is rather more complicated. The basic idea of the ‘Umdeutung’ was motivated by
Hans Kramers’ dispersion theory, which became part of the 1924 Bohr-Kramers-Slater
quantum theory of radiation. Heisenberg extended the procedure in Kramers’ disper-
sion theory to replace position and momentum with corresponding quantum variables,
which he took to satisfy the same relations as their classical counterparts—hence the
‘re-interpretation’ of classical quantities. Bohr’s orbits were eliminated by replacing
quantities associated with a single orbit with quantities associated with transitions be-
tween two orbits, representing the observable features of atomic spectra instead of the
unobservable orbits. Multiplying these two-index transition quantities together turned
out to be noncomutative: AB 6= BA.4
Heisenberg developed his idea of a noncommutative quantum mechanics in col-
laboration with Born and Pascual Jordan, and the first version of quantum mechanics
appeared as their Dreimännerarbeit paper published later in 1925. It subsequently be-
came apparent, with Heisenberg’s interpretation of his commutation relations in 1927
and the Dirac-Jordan transformation theory, developed independently in 1927 by Jor-
dan and Paul Dirac, that systems in this noncommutative mechanics can’t have definite
values for all physical quantities simultaneously. In particular, an electron can’t have
definite position and momentum values and so can’t have a well-defined orbit in an
atom.
Erwin Schrödinger published a wave-mechanical version of the theory in 1926 that
kept the orbits and explained their quantization as a wave phenomenon. It is generally
supposed that he also proved the formal equivalence of wave mechanics and Heisen-
berg’s matrix mechanics, but in fact Schrödinger proved only the empirical equivalence
3 W. Heisenberg, ‘Quantum-theoretical re-interpretation of kinematic and mechanical relations.’ Trans-

lation of ‘Über quantentheoretische Umdeutung kinematischer und mechanischer Beziehungen,’ Zeitschrift

für Physik 33, 879–893 (1925). In B.L. van der Waerden (ed.), Sources of Quantum Mechanics. Amsterdam:
North-Holland (1967); p. 262.
4 See Michel Janssen, ‘Arches and scaffolds: bridging continuity and discontinuity in theory change.’ In

Alan C. Love and William C. Wimsatt (eds.), Beyond the Meme. Articulating Dynamic Structures in Cultural
Evolution. Minneapolis: University of Minnesota Press, forthcoming 2019; section IV, 4th case study.

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of the two theories for experiments relevant at the time. The general theoretical ques-
tion of equivalence was first addressed by Jordan and Dirac in their transformation the-
ory and definitively settled by John von Neumann in the first paper of his 1927 trilogy,
in which he reformulated quantum mechanics as a theory of ‘observables’ represented
by operators and states represented by rays in Hilbert space.5 In the second paper of the
trilogy, von Neumann derived the Born rule specifying the probability, in a quantum
state, of finding the value of an observable in a given range in a measurement.6
Von Neumann’s derivation of the Born rule is usually associated with his proof of
the impossibility of ‘completing’ quantum mechanics by introducing additional ‘hid-
den variables’ in his 1932 book.7 Since the critique of von Neumann’s argument by
John Bell in 1965,8 the consensus in the literature seems to be that the proof makes an
unwarranted assumption and fails to exclude any significant class of hidden variables,
and hence von Neumann’s derivation of the Born rule from the geometry of Hilbert
space is flawed. I have argued 9 that Bell’s analysis misconstrues von Neumann’s ‘no
hidden variables’ argument, and that the assumptions are appropriate in the context of
the proof. As von Neumann put it, the quantum probabilities are ‘sui generis’10 and
‘uniquely given from the start’ as a feature of the geometry of Hilbert space, related to
the angle between rays in Hilbert space representing ‘pure’ quantum states.11
Physicists, not surprisingly, found wave mechanics more familiar and intuitively
appealing than Heisenberg’s version of quantum mechanics. The wave theory seemed
to provide an explanation of observed phenomena in terms of causal processes evolving
continuously in space and time, as opposed to Heisenberg’s derivation of irreducible
transition probabilities from features of a noncommutative algebraic structure. As
Schrödinger initially saw it, the wave theory had the advantage of Anschaulichkeit, usu-
ally translated as clarity or visualizability, here in the specific sense of representability
as a causal picture of events unfolding continuously in space and time.12
Heisenberg emphatically disagreed. As he put it in a letter to Pauli (June 8, 1926):13
The more I think about the physical portion of Schrödinger’s theory, the
5 Janssen, ibid., section IV, fifth case study. John von Neumann, ‘Mathematische Begründung der
Quantenmechanik,’ Königliche Gesellschaft der Wissenschaften zu Göttingen: Mathematisch-physikalische
Klasse, Nachrichten 1–57, (1927).
6 John von Neumann, ‘Wahrscheinlichkeitstheoretischer Aufbau der Quantenmechanik,’ Königliche

Gesellschaft der Wissenschaften zu Göttingen: Mathematisch-physikalische Klasse, Nachrichten 245–272,

(1927).
7 John von Neumann, Mathematische Grundlagen der Quantenmechanik. Berlin: Springer, 1932.
8 John S. Bell, ‘On the problem of hidden variables in quantum mechanics,’ Reviews of Modern Physics

38, 447–452 (1965).

9 Jeffrey Bub, ‘Von Neumann’s “no hidden variables” proof: a re-appraisal,’ Foundations of Physics 40,

1333–1340 (2010).
10 John von Neumann, ‘Quantum logics: strict- and probability-logics.’ A 1937 unfinished manuscript

published in A.H. Taub (ed.), Collected Works of John von Neumann, Volume 4. Oxford and New York:
Pergamon Press, 1961; pp. 195–197.
11 John von Neumann, ‘Unsolved problems in mathematics.’ An address to the International Mathematical

Congress, Amsterdam, September 2, 1954. In Miklós Rédei and Michael Stöltzner (eds.), John von Neumann
and the Foundations of Quantum Physics. Dordrecht: Kluwer, 2001; pp. 231–245.
12 See B. Cassin, E. Apter, J. Lezra, M. Wood (eds.), Dictionary of Untranslatables: A Philosophical

Lexicon. Princeton: Princeton University Press, 2014; p. 37 ‘Anschaulichkeit,’ by Catherine Chavalley.

13 W. Pauli, Wissentschaftlicher Briefwechsel mit Bohr, Einstein, Heisenberg u.a., Volume 1 (1919–1929),

A. Hermann, K. von Meyenn, V. F. Weiskopf (eds.). Berlin: Springer, 1979; p. 328.

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 more repulsive [abscheulich] I find it. . . . What Schrödinger writes about
the Anschaulichkeit of his theory ‘is probably not quite right,’ in other
words it’s crap [Mist].
The dispute between Heisenberg and Schrödinger about ‘Anschaulichkeit’ is the root of
the debate between an orthodox camp, represented primarily by the diverse but related
views of Bohr, Heisenberg, Pauli, and Rosenfeld, dubbed the Copenhagen interpreta-
tion by Heisenberg, and the dissidents, represented by Schrödinger with Einstein as a
powerful ally, and later by Bohm, Everett, Bell, and others. How this debate evolved
between 1950 and 1990 is the subject of Olival Freire’s authoritative and meticulously
researched book, The Quantum Dissidents.
In a seminal 1935 paper, Einstein, Podolsky, and Rosen drew attention to the ex-
istence of non-separable or ‘entangled’ states of separated systems and exploited their
correlations in an argument for the incompleteness of quantum mechanics. Entanglement—
what Schrödinger called ‘the characteristic trait of quantum mechanics, the one that en-
forces its entire departure from classical lines of thought’14— was pretty much ignored
until John Bell came along in the 1960s and re-examined the Einstein-Podolsky-Rosen
argument, using David Bohm’s 1951 reformulation in terms of spin components in
different directions rather than position and momentum,15 but the question of com-
pleteness dominated the debates between Bohr and Einstein. What Einstein had in
mind was that something was left out of the quantum theory, which, if added to the
theory, would restore the sort of ‘Anschaulichkeit’ characteristic of classical theories.
The completeness issue was never, for Einstein or Schrödinger, just about restoring
determinism. As Pauli pointed out in correspondence with Born (March 31, 1954):16
Einstein does not consider the concept of ‘determinism’ to be as funda-
mental as it is frequently held out to be (as he told me emphatically many
times) . . . . In the same way he ‘disputes’ that he uses as criterion for
the admissibility of a theory the question: ‘Is it rigorously deterministic?’
Einstein’s point of departure is ‘realistic’ rather than ‘deterministic,’ which
means that his philosophical prejudice is a different one.’
The question of ‘Anschaulichkeit’ morphed into a debate about the possibility of a
realist interpretation of quantum mechanics, with the dissidents accusing the Copen-
hagenists of the sin of positivism or instrumentalism, which by the 1960s had lost much
of its appeal among philosophers.
Freire shows how research on the foundations of quantum mechanics, which was
not regarded seriously as ‘real physics’ in the 1950s and 1960s, achieved respectability
in spite of sometimes virulent opposition to the dissidents as the field of quantum infor-
mation emerged in the 1990s, following Bell’s seminal nonlocality result in 1964 and
the subsequent tests of quantum nonlocality in the 1980s by Alain Aspect and others.
14 E. Schrödinger, ‘Discussion of probability relations between separated systems,’ Mathematical Proceed-

ings of the Cambridge Philosophical Society 31, 555–563 (1935); p. 555.

15 David Bohm, Quantum Theory. New York: Prentice Hall, 1951.
16 M. Born, The Born-Einstein Letters. London: Walker and Co., 1971; p. 221. See Christoph Lehner,

‘Einstein’s realism and his critique of quantum mechanics.’ In Michel Janssen and Christoph Lehner (eds.),
The Cambridge Companion to Einstein. Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 2014.

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The increasingly sophisticated experimental techniques designed to test aspects of non-
local entanglement transformed foundational questions from what physicists regarded
as the sort of thing one might discuss over a beer at the end of a day of doing real
physics, to issues that were taken seriously and could, at least in principle, be settled
empirically.
The Quantum Dissidents begins with an account of David Bohm’s causal interpre-
tation of quantum mechanics, published as two papers in the Physical Review in 1952.
I was a graduate student with Bohm’s group in London in the 1960s and one of the dis-
sidents mentioned by Freire, so I found the chapter on Bohm particularly fascinating.
Influenced by Einstein, Bohm proposed his theory as a counter-example to von Neu-
mann’s ‘no hidden variables’ proof, which was widely accepted at the time. Freire’s
dscussion illuminates the political and philosophical background to Bohm’s theory and
the caustic hostility to his theory by Copenhagenists like Leon Rosenfeld, a fellow
Marxist. Following his testimony to the House Un-American Activities Committee,
where he refused to testify against colleagues, Bohm lost his position at Princeton. He
moved to Brazil, where he was offered a position at the University of São Paulo, but
was unable to travel after US authorities confiscated his passport. Eventually, after ob-
taining Brazilian citizenship (and consequently losing his US citizenship), he moved to
the Technion in Israel, and finally to the University of London as Chair of Theoretical
Physics at Birkbeck College.
The second major dissident in the 1950s was Hugh Everett III, who proposed a
‘relative state’ formulation of quantum mechanics, dubbed the ‘many-worlds’ interpre-
tation by Bryce DeWitt. Both Bohm and Everett begin with Schrödinger’s version of
quantum mechanics. For Bohm, the wave function plays the role of a guiding wave
for the motions of particles that follow well-defined trajectories. For Everett, the wave
function, as a superposition of terms associated with different possible values of an
observable, is all there is as a representation of physical reality. The superposition is
interpreted as a multiplicity, with each term representing a ‘branch,’ or possible world.
As Everett put it to DeWitt (Freire, p. 102):
From the viewpoint of the theory, all elements of a superposition (all
‘branches’) are ‘actual,’ none any more real than another.’ It is completely
unnecessary to suppose that after an observation somehow one element of
the final superposition is selected to be awarded with a mysterious qual-
ity called ‘reality’ and the others condemned to oblivion. We can be more
charitable and allow the others to exist—they won’t cause any trouble any-
way because all the separate elements of the superposition (‘branches’) in-
dividually obey the wave equation with complete indifference to the pres-
ence or absence (‘actuality’ or not) of the other elements.
Probabilities are subjective for an observer in a world (which raises some fundamental
issues about probability that remain controversial in contemporary versions of Everett’s
formulation), and properties, or values of an observable, are relative to a world and not
associated with a classical record, as they are on the Copenhagen interpretation. Ev-
erett’s analysis accounts for the subjective experience of an observer in this multiverse
by considering correlations between memory states.

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 Everett was a graduate student when he proposed the idea as his PhD dissertation
topic. Freire discusses in detail the difficulties Everett faced with his advisor, John
Wheeler, who insisted on obtaining Bohr’s imprimatur, at one point dispatching Everett
to Copenhagen. The visit did not go well. Years later Rosenfeld wrote to Frederik
Belinfante (Freire, p. 114):
With regard to Everett neither I nor even Niels Bohr could have any pa-
tience with him when he visited us in Copenhagen more than 12 years ago
in order to sell the hopelessly wrong ideas he had been encouraged, most
unwisely, by Wheeler to develop. He was undescribably (sic) stupid and
could not understand the simplest things in quantum mechanics.
Another interesting development was the rival orthodoxy of the Princeton school,
represented by Eugene Wigner’s treatment of the measurement problem, and the Tausk
affair. Von Neumann’s Hilbert space formulation of quantum mechanics, accepted
as the standard version of the theory, distinguishes two processes: the deterministic
Schrödinger dynamical evolution that occurs when a system is not measured, and the
stochastic ‘collapse’ process formalized by von Neumann’s ‘projection postulate’ that
occurs during measurement, when the quantum state collapses or is projected onto the
term in the superposition representing the measurement outcome. Following von Neu-
mann’s analysis, the measurement problem became the problem of accounting for this
dual dynamics, or somehow reconciling the stochastic collapse with the deterministic
Schrödinger dynamics.
Wigner took the position, supported by an argument now known as the ‘Wigner’s
friend’ argument, that the collapse of the quantum state is something that happens
when information about a measurement outcome enters the mind of a conscious ob-
server. Three Italian physicists, Adriana Daneri, Angelo Loinger, and Giovanni Maria
Prosperi (DLP), published a quantum treatment of macrosystems in 1962 that aimed
to show that the collapse is an ergodic process that occurs in the macroscopic measur-
ing instrument. Rosenfeld vigorously defended the DLP theory as vindicating Bohr’s
view. Klaus Tausk was a young Brazilian physicist at the International Center for The-
oretical Physics in Trieste who wrote a paper critical of the DLP theory. Freire shows
how Rosenfeld was instrumental not only in suppressing further publication of Tausk’s
paper, following its appearance as an internal report of the ICTP, but in effectively
ruining Tausk’s career. After Rosenfeld’s intervention, Tausk was abandoned by his
advisor and barely obtained his PhD degree.
I played a small role in the Tausk affair. Tausk sent me a copy of the ICTP report,
which formed the basis of my own critique of the DLP theory, published in Nuovo
Cimento in 1968. According to Freire (Freire, p. 186), I was the only person who
cited Tausk’s preprint. Since, as Freire documents, I wasn’t the only person whom
Tausk influenced, the comment shows how shabbily Tausk was treated by the physics
community as a direct result of Rosenfeld’s intervention.
The final chapters in the book take us up to the 1980s and 1990s, beginning with
Aspect’s experiments on Bell’s theorem and concluding with quantum information as
a new and fertile field of investigation in physics, with applications to quantum cryp-
tography, quantum communication, and quantum computation. These developments

6
finally changed the status of research on the conceptual foundations of quantum me-
chanics from ‘philosophy’ to ‘real physics.’ Freire quotes Greenberger on the profound
significance of Bell’s result (Freire, p. 245):
John Bell’s status in our field has the same [like Isaac Newton, James
Watson, and Linus Pauling] mythic quality. Before him there was nothing,
only the philosophical disputes between famous old men. He showed that
the field contained physics, experimental physics, and nothing has been
the same since.
What is Real? by Adam Becker has been phenomenally successful as a non-
academic work that covers some of the same ground as Freire. In fact, Becker ac-
knowledges that Freire’s book ‘easily halved the time I spend on research for this book’
(Becker, p. 296). The emphasis, though, is quite different. In The Quantum Dissi-
dents, Freire explores how ideas on the conceptual foundations of quantum mechanics
evolved in the period after World War II, and the historical, political, and sociological
factors that played a role in elevating quantum foundations from the fringes of physics
to a serious research topic. By contrast, Becker’s aim is to show how the ‘monocracy’
of the Copenhagen interpretation was challenged by the dissidents, in spite of great
personal loss to their careers as physicists, so that today, while most physicists might
still pay lip service to some version of the Copenhagen interpretation, it has become
increasingly clear, as Einstein put it, that this was always nothing more than ‘a tran-
quilizing philosophy’ and ‘a soft pillow for the true believer’ (Becker, p. 14).
Becker writes vividly in a way that brings the central figures of the story to life:
the young Heisenberg and Schrödinger inventing quantum mechanics in the 1920s,
Einstein and Bohr debating conceptual issues at the Solvay conferences, Heisenberg’s
arrest in 1945 and internment by the British with other physicists involved in Nazi Ger-
many’s nuclear program. The chapters on Bohm and Everett, and the resistance they
faced from the Bohr camp, are a great read. The discussion of Bell and his nonlocality
result, and the story about how Clauser, Shimony, Aspect and other figures designed
and performed the experiments in the 1970s and 1980s to test Bell’s inequality that
were instrumental in bringing about what Aspect calls ‘the second quantum revolu-
tion,’ is quite riveting.
A core part of Becker’s thesis is his dismissal of the Copenhagen interpretation
as a positivist or instrumentalist aberration (Becker, pp. 14–15) or, following David
Merman (Becker, p. 275), as a retreat to ‘shut up and calculate’ or, quoting David
Albert (Becker, p. 283), as simply ‘incoherent,’ ‘unintelligible,’ ‘gibberish.’ In several
places Becker invokes the quote, ‘there is no quantum world,’ commonly attributed to
Bohr (Becker, p. 14):
What does quantum physics tell us about the world? According to the
Copenhagen interpretation this question has a very simple answer: quan-
tum mechanics tells us nothing whatsoever about the world. . . . According
to Bohr, there isn’t a story about the quantum world because ‘there is no
quantum world. There is only an abstract quantum physical description.’
The ‘no quantum world’ comment is actually a quote from Bohr’s assistant Aage Pe-

7
tersen,17 who recounts Bohr saying this sort of thing. Bohr probably did make provoca-
tive statements along these lines in discussion, but he certainly did not mean that there
is simply nothing there, as Becker seems to suggest.
What could Bohr have meant? Here’s my take on it. Quantum mechanics replaces
the commutative algebra of physical quantities of a classical system with a noncommu-
tative algebra of ‘observables.’ This is an extraordinary move, quite unprecedented in
the history of physics, and arguably requires us to re-think what counts as an acceptable
explanation in physics. To understand what noncommutativity involves it’s helpful to
think of two-valued observables. These represent properties of a quantum system (for
example, the property that the energy of the system lies in a certain range of values,
with the two values of the observable representing ‘yes’ or ‘no’), or propositions (the
proposition asserting that the value of the energy lies in a certain range, with the two
values representing ‘true’ or ‘false’). The two-valued observables of a classical system
form a Boolean algebra.
We all, in a loose sense, understand the concept of a Boolean algebra, even if the
term is unfamiliar. It’s simply a formalization of the way in which we commonly think
of properties or propositions fitting together when we combine them with connectives
‘and,’ ‘or,’ ‘not,’ so that it’s possible to imagine a classical or commonsense ‘state of
reality’ in which every proposition is assigned a truth value, either ‘true’ or ‘false,’
consistently with the connectives. George Boole characterized the algebraic structure
he identified in 1847 as capturing ‘the conditions of possible experience.’18
To say that the algebra of observables of a quantum system is noncommutative
is formally equivalent to saying that the sub-algebra of properties or propositions is
non-Boolean. Hilbert space formalizes this non-Booleanity in a particular way. The
Boolean algebra of classical mechanics is replaced by a collection of Boolean alge-
bras, one for each set of commuting two-valued observables. The interconnections of
commuting and noncommuting observables preclude the possibility of embedding the
whole collection into one inclusive Boolean algebra, so you can’t assign truth-values
consistently to the propositions about observable values in all these Boolean algebras.
Putting it differently, there are Boolean algebras in the collection of Boolean algebras
of a quantum system, for example the Boolean algebras for position and momentum, or
for spin components in different directions, that don’t fit together into a single Boolean
algebra, unlike the corresponding collection for a classical system. A ‘world’ in which
it is possible to talk about truth and falsity, referring to this rather than that, is Boolean.
In this sense, there is no non-Boolean quantum ‘world’—there is no consistent assign-
ment of truth-values to all quantum propositions defining a ‘state of reality.’
Bohr did not refer to Boolean algebras, but the concept is simply a precise way of
codifying a significant aspect of what Bohr meant by his constant insistence that ‘the
account of all evidence must be expressed in classical terms,’ that’s to say ‘unambigu-
17 Aage Petersen, ‘The Philosophy of Niels Bohr,’ Bulletin of the Atomic Scientists 19, 8–14 (1963). The

quote is on p. 12: ‘When asked whether the algorithm of quantum mechanics could be considered as some-
how mirroring an underlying quantum world, Bohr would answer, “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.”
18 Itamar Pitowsky. ‘George Boole’s “conditions of possible experience” and the quantum puzzle.’ British

Journal for the Philosophy of Science 45, 9–125 (1994).

8
ous language with suitable application of the terminology of classical physics,’ for the
simple reason, as he put it, that we need to be able ‘to tell others what we have done
and what we have learned.’19 Formally speaking, the significance of ‘classical’ here
as being able ‘to tell others what we have done and what we have learned’ is that the
events in question should fit together as a Boolean algebra, so conforming to Boole’s
‘conditions of possible experience.’
In the non-Boolean theory of quantum mechanics, probabilities arise via the Born
rule as a feature of the geometry of Hilbert space. These probabilities can’t be under-
stood as quantifying ignorance about the pre-measurement value of an observable, as
in a Boolean theory. For the Copenhagenists, quantum mechanics is a new sort of non-
representational theory for an irreducibly indeterministic universe, with a new type of
nonlocal probabilistic correlation for ‘entangled’ quantum states of separated systems,
where the correlated events are intrinsically random, not merely apparently random
like coin tosses.
Hilbert space provides the kinematic framework for such an irreducibly indeter-
ministic universe, in a similar sense to which Minkowski space provides the kinematic
framework for the physics of a non-Newtonian, relativistic universe. In special rela-
tivity, Lorentz contraction is a kinematic effect of the spatio-temporal constraints on
events imposed by the geometry of Minkowski space. In quantum mechanics, the
loss of information in a quantum measurement—Bohr’s ‘irreducible and uncontrol-
lable disturbance’—is a kinematic (i.e., pre-dynamic) effect of any process of gaining
information of the relevant sort, irrespective of the dynamical processes involved in
the measurement process, given the objective probabilistic constraints on correlations
between events imposed by the geometry of Hilbert space.
On this view, quantum mechanics does not provide a representational explanation
of events. Noncomutativity or non-Booleanity makes quantum mechanics quite unlike
any theory we have dealt with before, and there is no reason, apart from tradition,
to assume that a theory should provide the sort of ‘anschaulich’ explanation we are
familiar with in a theory that is commutative or Boolean at the fundamental level.
But aren’t Bohm’s theory and the Everett interpretation perfectly good representa-
tional or ‘anschaulich’ theories, empirically equivalent to standard quantum mechan-
ics? After all, they are proposals intended to explain phenomena in terms of a causal
process in space and time involving an underlying ontology. It’s questionable, though,
whether they are in fact good representational theories, or even whether they make the
same predictions as standard quantum mechanics in all experimental setups: the devil
is in the details.
As Bell points out,20 Bohm’s theory involves action at a distance at the level of
the hidden variables: ‘an explicit causal mechanism exists whereby the disposition of
one piece of apparatus affects the results obtained with a distant piece,’ so that ‘the
Einstein-Podolsky-Rosen paradox is resolved in the way which Einstein would have
liked least.’ The problem of making sense of probability in an Everettian universe,
19 Niels Bohr, ‘Discussions with Einstein on epistemological problems in modern physics.’ In P. A. Schilpp

(ed.), Albert Einstein: Philosopher-Scientist, The Library of Living Philosophers, Volume 7 (Open Court,
Evanston, 1949); pp. 201–241.
20 J. S. Bell, Speakable and Unspeakable in Quantum Mechanics. Cambridge: Cambridge University

Press, 1987; p. 11.

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where everything that can happen does happen in some world, is still a contentious
issue. Everettian quantum mechanics and Bohm’s theory in a generalized sense can be
understood as different interpretations of the same underlying theory—Everett’s the-
ory is simply ‘the pilot-wave theory without trajectories,’ as Bell put it21 — and there
is a sense in which this Bohm-Everett theory is not empirically equivalent to standard
quantum mechanics. For scenarios that involve ‘Wigner’s friend’ type setups, these
theories make different predictions, as pointed out recently by Veronika Baumann and
Stefan Wolf.22 Such experiments are not remotely possible in practice, although noth-
ing in quantum mechanics forbids their implementation in principle. So perhaps the
Copenhagenists’ riposte to Mermin’s characterization of the Copenhagen interpreta-
tion as ‘shut up and calculate’ should be ‘shut up and wait’ until physicists figure out
how to do a crucial experiment that decides between these theories.
Philip Ball’s book, Beyond Weird, is a non-technical but nonetheless clear and
deeply illuminating exploration of what makes quantum mechanics so tantalizingly
puzzling. The discussion of various interpretations includes Bohm’s theory and Ev-
erett’s many-worlds interpretation, but also QBism (short for quantum Bayesianism),
an information-theoretic interpretation developed primarily by Chris Fuchs and Rüdi-
ger Schack, based on treating quantum probabilities as purely subjective degrees of
belief (pp. 121–125). (Surprisingly, there is no reference to QBism in Becker’s book,
although there is a cryptic reference to Fuchs in the Acknowledgements.)
Ball is not a fan of the many-worlds interpretation (Ball, p. 305):
What quantum theory seems to insist is that at the fundamental level the
world cannot supply clear ‘yes/no’ empirical answers to all the questions
that seem at face value as though they should have one. The calm ac-
ceptance of that fact by the Copenhagen Interpretation seems to some,
and with good reason, to be far too unsatisfactory and complacent. The
MWI [many-worlds interpretation] is an exuberant attempt to rescue the
‘yes/no,’ albeit at the cost of admitting both of them at once. . . . And in the
end, if you say everything is true, you have said nothing.
In a perceptive analysis of the Einstein-Poldolsky-Rosen argument and Bell’s non-
locality proof, Ball draws the opposite conclusion to Becker about the Copenhagen
interpretation (Ball, p. 177):
There can be no clearer demonstration that Bohr’s refusal to contemplate
any meaning for things not observed wasn’t just stubborn pedantry. If
he’s right, there are measurable consequences. This wouldn’t mean that
the Copenhagen interpretation is correct, but it would mean that Einstein’s
hidden variables—any attempt, in fact, to fix everything in principle in a
quantum system before it is observed—won’t wash.

He goes on to make an insightful distinction between action at a distance and quantum

nonlocality (Ball, p. 184):
21 J.S.Bell, ibid., p. 133.
22 Veronika Baumann and Stefan Wolf, ‘On formalisms and interpretations,’ Quantum 2, 99 (2018)

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 But this nonlocality is just what quantum entanglement undermines—
which is why ‘spooky action at a distance is precisely the wrong way to
look at it. . . . In quantum mechanics, properties can be non-local. Only if
we accept Einstein’s assumptions of locality do we need to tell the story in
terms of a measurement on particle A ‘influencing’ the spin of particle B.
Quantum non-locality is the alternative to that view.
There is a lengthy and sophisticated discussion of how decoherence plays a role
in ensuring the effective classicality of the macrolevel (Ball, pp. 198–251). The fi-
nal chapters contain an excellent non-technical discussion of information-theoretic ap-
proaches to quantum mechanics, and an explanation of how entanglement can be ex-
ploited for efficient quantum communication and quantum computation (Ball, p, 284):
Understanding exactly how quantum mechanics can improve computing
may turn out to provide insights into one of the deepest questions of the
field: what quantum information really is, and how it can be transmitted
and altered.
So read all three books. In different ways, they are all about the ongoing saga of in-
terpreting the quantum world, and about how we are beginning to get some fascinating
new answers to old questions.

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