The strange story of the von Neumann impossibility proof is recalled, and the even stranger story of later impossibility proofs, and how the impossible was done by de Broglie and Bohm. Morals are drawn.

The final work of a distinguished physicist, this remarkable volume examines the emotive significance of time, the time order of mechanics, the time direction of thermodynamics and microstatistics, the time direction of macrostatistics, and the time of quantum physics. Coherent discussions include accounts of analytic methods of scientific philosophy in the investigation of probability, quantum mechanics, the theory of relativity, and causality. "[Reichenbach’s] best by a good deal."—Physics Today. 1971 ed.

From the beginning, the implications of quantum theory for our most general understanding of the world have been a matter of intense debate. Einstein argues that the theory had to be regarded as fundamentally incomplete. Its inability, for example, to predict the exact time of decay of a single radioactive atom had to be due to a failure of the theory and not due to a permanent inability on our part or a fundamental indeterminism in nature itself. In 1964, John (...) Bell derived a theorem which showed that any deterministic theory which preserved locality would have certain consequences for measurements performed at a distance from one another. An experimental check seems to show that these consequences are not, in fact, realized. The correlation between the sets of events is much stronger than any local deterministic theory could allow. What is more, this stronger correlation is precisely that which is predicted by quantum theory. The astonishing result is that local deterministic theories of the classical sort seem to be permanently excluded. Not only can the individual decay not be predicted, but no future theory can ever predict it. The contributors in this volume wrestle with this conclusion. Some welcome it; others leave open a return to at lease some kind of deterministic world, one which must however allow something like action-at-a distance. How much lit it? And how can one avoid violating relativity theory, which excludes action-at-a-distance? How can a clash between the two fundamental theories of modern physics, relativity and quantum theory, be avoided? What are the consequences for the traditional philosophic issue of causality explanation and objectivity? One thing is certain; we can never return to the comfortable Newtonian world where everything that happened was, in principle, predictable and where what happened at one measurement site could not affect another set of measurements being performed light-years away, at a distance that a light-signal could not bridge. Contributors: James T. Cushing, Abner Shimony, N. David Mermin, Jon P. Jarrett, Linda Wessels, Bas C. van Fraassen, Jeremy Butterfield, Michael L. G. Redhead, Henry P. Stapp, Arthur Fine, R. I. G. Hughes, Paul Teller, Don Howard, Henry J. Folse, and Ernan McMullin. (shrink)

Presents a guide to the basics of quantum mechanics and measurement.

Aiming to unravel the mystery of quantum mechanics, this book is concerned with questions about action-at-a-distance, holism, and whether quantum mechanics gives a complete account of microphysical reality. With rigorous arguments and clear thinking, the author provides an introduction to the philosophy of physics.

In recent years, something of a consensus has emerged amongst philosophers of physics to the effect that the violation of Bell's inequalities forces us to draw strong metaphysical conclusions about the structure of the physical world. The arguments which support this position are taken to have weak and general premises, mostly amounting to descriptions of relatively bare experimental data. These premises putatively point to formal constraints on the possible models of the phenomena; from there, we are led to a metaphysical (...) outcome. In particular, it is widely believed that any adequate model of the phenomena will violate a probabilistic constraint known as "completeness"; what is more, the idea that this formal result signals holism in the world is gaining momentum. I begin by showing that this argument has the particular appeal that, if successful, it must command the allegiance of both the scientific realist and the constructive empiricist. Unfortunately, on close examination the conclusion about formal matters is not well-supported by the non-partisan arguments for it. ;Despite this, many would claim that we can arrive at the same formal conclusion by appealing to the internal structure of quantum mechanics. Such a manoeuvre can only have force for the realist, and so if we adopt it we have lost the hope of laying aside epistemological disagreements in the performance of metaphysics. Nonetheless, I go on to examine the interpretational claim that failures of completeness are indicative of physical holism. If this claim is correct, then there should be an argument for completeness which takes the absence of holism as a premise. Constructing such an argument should help us to discover exactly what sort of holism is involved, if any. I locate such an argument, and conclude that invoking holism in quite a central sense is indeed one way of understanding the failure of Bell inequalities. I close by detailing the considerable difficulties we might have in reconciling ourselves to such an understanding. These difficulties, I argue, are ones which must beset any attempt to understand the failure of the Bell inequalities by invoking holism. (shrink)