Book contents
- Frontmatter
- Contents
- List of papers on quantum philosophy by J. S. Bell
- Preface to the first edition
- Acknowledgements
- Introduction: John Bell and the second quantum revolution
- 1 On the problem of hidden variables in quantum mechanics
- 2 On the Einstein–Podolsky–Rosen paradox
- 3 The moral aspect of quantum mechanics
- 4 Introduction to the hidden-variable question
- 5 Subject and object
- 6 On wave packet reduction in the Coleman–Hepp model
- 7 The theory of local beables
- 8 Locality in quantum mechanics: reply to critics
- 9 How to teach special relativity
- 10 Einstein–Podolsky–Rosen experiments
- 11 The measurement theory of Everett and de Broglie's pilot wave
- 12 Free variables and local causality
- 13 Atomic-cascade photons and quantum-mechanical nonlocality
- 14 de Broglie–Bohm, delayed-choice double-slit experiment, and density matrix
- 15 Quantum mechanics for cosmologists
- 16 Bertlmann's socks and the nature of reality
- 17 On the impossible pilot wave
- 18 Speakable and unspeakable in quantum mechanics
- 19 Beables for quantum field theory
- 20 Six possible worlds of quantum mechanics
- 21 EPR correlations and EPW distributions
- 22 Are there quantum jumps?
- 23 Against ‘measurement’
- 24 La nouvelle cuisine
22 - Are there quantum jumps?
Published online by Cambridge University Press: 11 April 2011
- Frontmatter
- Contents
- List of papers on quantum philosophy by J. S. Bell
- Preface to the first edition
- Acknowledgements
- Introduction: John Bell and the second quantum revolution
- 1 On the problem of hidden variables in quantum mechanics
- 2 On the Einstein–Podolsky–Rosen paradox
- 3 The moral aspect of quantum mechanics
- 4 Introduction to the hidden-variable question
- 5 Subject and object
- 6 On wave packet reduction in the Coleman–Hepp model
- 7 The theory of local beables
- 8 Locality in quantum mechanics: reply to critics
- 9 How to teach special relativity
- 10 Einstein–Podolsky–Rosen experiments
- 11 The measurement theory of Everett and de Broglie's pilot wave
- 12 Free variables and local causality
- 13 Atomic-cascade photons and quantum-mechanical nonlocality
- 14 de Broglie–Bohm, delayed-choice double-slit experiment, and density matrix
- 15 Quantum mechanics for cosmologists
- 16 Bertlmann's socks and the nature of reality
- 17 On the impossible pilot wave
- 18 Speakable and unspeakable in quantum mechanics
- 19 Beables for quantum field theory
- 20 Six possible worlds of quantum mechanics
- 21 EPR correlations and EPW distributions
- 22 Are there quantum jumps?
- 23 Against ‘measurement’
- 24 La nouvelle cuisine
Summary
If we have to go on with these damned quantum jumps, then I'm sorry that I ever got involved.
E. SchrödingerIntroduction
I have borrowed the title of a characteristic paper by Schrödinger (Schrödinger, 1952). In it he contrasts the smooth evolution of the Schrödinger wavefunction with the erratic behaviour of the picture by which the wavefunction is usually supplemented, or ‘interpreted’, in the minds of most physicists. He objects in particular to the notion of ‘stationary states’, and above all to ‘quantum jumping’ between those states. He regards these concepts as hangovers from the old Bohr quantum theory, of 1913, and entirely unmotivated by anything in the mathematics of the new theory of 1926. He would like to regard the wavefunction itself as the complete picture, and completely determined by the Schrödinger equation, and so evolving smoothly without ‘quantum jumps’. Nor would he have ‘particles’ in the picture. At an early stage, he had tried to replace ‘particles’ by wavepackets (Schrödinger, 1926). But wavepackets diffuse. And the paper of 1952 ends, rather lamely, with the admission that Schrödinger does not see how, for the present, to account for particle tracks in track chambers … nor, more generally, for the definiteness, the particularity, of the world of experience, as compared with the indefiniteness, the waviness, of the wavefunction. It is the problem that he had had (Schrödinger, 1935a) with his cat. He thought that she could not be both dead and alive.
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- Information
- Speakable and Unspeakable in Quantum MechanicsCollected Papers on Quantum Philosophy, pp. 201 - 212Publisher: Cambridge University PressPrint publication year: 2004
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