The Message of the Atoms: Essays on Wolfgang Pauli and the Unspeakable

Description

When I meet a difficult problem, I begin to go around it, approaching it again and again from different directions. If I persistently continue these approaches, it can happen that no problem remains. (RolfNevanlinna, in a private discussion.) In 1976, after a mainly administrative period of some 15 years, I spent a couple of months at CERN, working in the Pauli Collection. When I found the Pauli-Fierz correspondence, I had the intuitive feeling that there was the key: that "it was an objective description, and that it was the only possible objective description" for the mysteries of quantum mechanics. Here I have cited Bohr in his 'last interview' (see Chap. 7), which I became acquainted with only later, but I was immediately convinced that Pauli's view was more profound than anything else I had read about in quantum mechanics. However, nowadays the investigation of the foundations of quantum theory is dominated by 'realism', which means that the influence of the psyche on our conception of reality is ignored. This book is an attempt to show that this is not possible in quantum mechanics Front Matter....Pages I-IX Introduction....Pages 1-4 Front Matter....Pages 5-6 Purgatory....Pages 7-14 The Atoms Have the Floor....Pages 15-24 Scientism....Pages 25-34 The Power of Materialism....Pages 35-38 Front Matter....Pages 39-40 Ontology Implied by the Copenhagen Interpretation....Pages 41-47 Basic Features of Wolfgang Pauli’s Philosophy....Pages 53-59 On the Meaning of Complementarity....Pages 61-69 On the Criticism by Natural Scientists....Pages 71-91 Front Matter....Pages 93-94 Freedom....Pages 95-114 Numinosum....Pages 115-120 The World of Spirit....Pages 121-132 The Problem of the Fourth....Pages 133-139 Front Matter....Pages 141-142 The Psychophysical World....Pages 143-152 The Reality Beyond....Pages 153-162 Reality and Values....Pages 163-169 Hubris and Punishment....Pages 171-181 Back Matter....Pages 183-203