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Locality/Separability: Is This Necessarily a Useful distinction?

Published online by Cambridge University Press:  28 February 2022

James T. Cushing
James T. Cushing*
Affiliation:
University of Notre Dame
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Extract

In the philosophy of science, we are to assess critically and on their intrinsic merits various proposals for a consistent interpretation of quantum mechanics, including resolutions of the measurement problem and accounts of the long-range Bell correlations. In this paper I suggest that the terms of debate may have been so severely and unduly constrained by the reigning orthodoxy that we labor unproductively with an unhelpful vocabulary and set of definitions and distinctions. I first review this situation and how we arrived there. Then I present an alternative conceptual framework, free of many of the standard conundrums, and ask why we seem unwilling to pursue it as a serious possibility.

I begin by sampling how some of the central tenets of the standard, or “Copenhagen”, theory of quantum mechanics came to be formulated. As is typical for his writing on broader philosophical issues, Niels Bohr's pronouncements on the interpretation of quantum mechanics are often difficult to understand and at times just plain opaque.

Type
Part III. Spacetime and Related Matters
Information
PSA: Proceedings of the Biennial Meeting of the Philosophy of Science Association , Volume 1994 , Issue 1: Volume One: Contributed Papers 1994 , 1994 , pp. 106 - 116
Copyright
Copyright © 1994 by the Philosophy of Science Association

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Footnotes

1

Partial support for this work was provided by the National Science Foundation under Grant Nos. DIR89-08497 and SBE91 21476.

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