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The Decline and Fall of Quantum Dualism

Published online by Cambridge University Press:  14 March 2022

Alfred Landé*
Affiliation:
Ohio State University

Abstract

The Bohr-Heisenberg doctrine of wave-particle duality has been attacked in the past for its methodical defects, over-complication, internal contradictions, its positivistic phenomenalism, etc. The present investigation shows that duality, the doctrine of equivalence of the particle picture and the wave picture of matter, is untenable since its wave part leads to empirically wrong results in the relativistic domain, and violates the postulate of independence of the arbitrary choice of reference system in the non-relativistic realm. Therefore, when methodical objections were never quite conclusive, the physical failure of the duality idea seals its fate irrefutably, together with all its pseudo-philosophical implications.

Type
Research Article
Copyright
Copyright © 1971 by The Philosophy of Science Association

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References

REFERENCES

[1] Landé, A., Foundations of Quantum Theory, Yale University Press, New Haven, 1955.Google Scholar
[2] Landé, A., From Dualism to Unity in Quantum Physics, Cambridge University Press, Cambridge, 1960.Google Scholar
[3] Landé, A., New Foundations of Quantum Mechanics, Cambridge University Press, Cambridge, 1965.Google Scholar