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  1. The rhetoric of antirealism and the copenhagen spirit.Mara Beller - 1996 - Philosophy of Science 63 (2):183-204.
    This paper argues against the possibility of presenting a consistent version of the Copenhagen Interpretation of Quantum Physics, characterizing its founders' philosophical pronouncements including those on the realism-antirealism issue, as a contingent collection of local, often contradictory, moves in changing theoretical and sociopolitical circumstances. The paper analyzes the fundamental differences of opinion between Bohr and the mathematical physicists, Heisenberg and Born, concerning the foundational doctrine of the "indispensability of classical concepts", and their related disagreements on "quantum reality." The paper concludes (...)
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  • Indeterminacy and the limits of classical concepts: The transformation of Heisenberg's thought.Kristian Camilleri - 2007 - Perspectives on Science 15 (2):178-201.
    : This paper examines the transformation which occurs in Heisenberg's understanding of indeterminacy in quantum mechanics between 1926 and 1928. After his initial but unsuccessful attempt to construct new quantum concepts of space and time, in 1927 Heisenberg presented an operational definition of concepts such as 'position' and 'velocity'. Yet, after discussions with Bohr, he came to the realisation that classical concepts such as position and momentum are indispensable in quantum mechanics in spite of their limited applicability. This transformation in (...)
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  • Looking for Those Natural Numbers: Dimensionless Constants and the Idea of Natural Measurement.Philip Mirowski - 1992 - Science in Context 5 (1):165-188.
    The ArgumentMany find it “notoriously difficult to see how societal context can affect in any essential way how someone solves a mathematical problem or makes a measurement.” That may be because it has been a habit of western scientists to assert their numerical schemes were untainted by any hint of anthropomorphism. Nevertheless, that Platonist penchant has always encountered obstacles in practice, primarily because the stability of any applied numerical scheme requires some alien or external warrant.This paper surveys the history of (...)
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  • Brownian Motion as a Limit to Physical Measuring Processes: A Chapter in the History of Noise from the Physicists’ Point of View.Martin Niss - 2016 - Perspectives on Science 24 (1):29-44.
    In this paper, we examine the history of the idea among physicists that there is a fundamental limit to physical measuring processes and that this limit is set by noise. In contrast to previous studies, that have focused on the realization of the existence of such a limit, we focus on the noise aspect of this history. In his monograph entitled Noise from 1954, the Dutch-American physicist and pioneer of noise Alder van der Ziel described how noise came to be (...)
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  • ‘Physics is a kind of metaphysics’: Émile Meyerson and Einstein’s late rationalistic realism.Marco Giovanelli - 2018 - European Journal for Philosophy of Science 8 (3):783-829.
    Gerald Holton has famously described Einstein’s career as a philosophical “pilgrimage”. Starting on “the historic ground” of Machian positivism and phenomenalism, following the completion of general relativity in late 1915, Einstein’s philosophy endured (a) a speculative turn: physical theorizing appears as ultimately a “pure mathematical construction” guided by faith in the simplicity of nature and (b) a realistic turn: science is “nothing more than a refinement ”of the everyday belief in the existence of mind-independent physical reality. Nevertheless, Einstein’s mathematical constructivism (...)
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