Measurement-induced interrelations between quantum mechanics and its interpretation

The development of quantum mechanics

The formalism of quantum mechanics was developed within the very short period of a few months in 1925 and 1926 by Heisenberg [Heis 25] and by Schrodinger [Schrö 26], respectively. Together with the contributions of Born and Jordan [BoJo 26], [BHJ 26], Dirac [Dir 26] and others, the formalism of this theory was already brought in 1926 into its final form, which is still used in present-day text books. (For all details of the historical development, we refer to the monograph by M. Jammer [Jam 74].) It is a very remarkable fact that a theory which was formulated 70 years ago has never been corrected or improved and is still considered to be valid. Numerous experiments performed during this long period to test the theory have confirmed it to a very high degree of accuracy without any exception. Hence there are good reasons to believe that quantum mechanics is universally valid and can be applied to all domains of reality, i.e., to atoms, molecules, macroscopic bodies, and to the whole universe.

However, the interpretation of the new theory was at the time of its mathematical formulation still an almost open problem. Any interpretation of quantum theory should provide interrelations between the theoretical expressions of the theory and possible experimental outcomes.