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(1985) A portrait of twenty-five years, Dordrecht, Springer.
Many of the pioneers of quantum mechanics — notably Planck, Einstein, Bohr, de Broglie, Heisenberg, Schrödinger, Born, Jordan, Landé, Wigner, and London — were seriously concerned with philosophical questions. In each case one can ask a question of psychological and historical interest: was it a philosophical penchant which drew the investigator towards a kind of physics research which is linked to philosophy, or was it rather that the conceptual difficulties of fundamental physics pulled him willy-nilly into the labyrinth of philosophy? I shall not undertake to discuss this question, but shall cite an opinion of Peter Bergmann, which I find congenial: he learned from Einstein that "the theoretical physicist is … a philosopher in workingman's clothes" ([1],q. v).
Publication details
DOI: 10.1007/978-94-009-5345-1_20
Full citation:
Shimony, A. (1985)., Reflections on the philosophy of Bohr, Heisenberg, and Schrödinger, in R. S. Cohen & M. W. Wartofsky (eds.), A portrait of twenty-five years, Dordrecht, Springer, pp. 305-317.
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