ok after reading those two posts I am convinced there is some philosophy going on here, I shall stay for now.
They at least are attempting some philosophy.
To add to what uwot just said hard nosed instrumentalists don't really exist and you are quite right that intrinsic properties like spin are induced but they are also experimental, based on the observations such as Compton scattering and so on; no one believes in just the evidence of experiment, that is what the peer review process is for and is also why there are many philosophical interpretations, shut up and calculate probably the most instrumentalist of the interpretations, really is nothing more than a positive assertion that nothing can be done to prove the uncertain, but one can at least calculate what experiment will yield inductively and without a precise classical systematic approach. In other words it's just Copenhagen lite. Or Copenhagen without the premise of having to provide an ontology, only having to yield to the experimental analysis and methods of science. Feynman was in this camp as are most of the more mainstream scienctists, not really caring to explore the philosophical ideas about what is a particle wave duality and superposition. If it works the experimentalists are less bothered than the theorists about why it works or what exactly the wave looks like if indeed it can ever be known to any precision.
Incidentally looking at where the wave is not, is one way of inferring where it is used in science, in that way you build up a picture of the wave without disturbing it, but this of course does not mean you know what something unobserved is, only what it isn't. Bohr used Kants philosophical ideas to more fully realise Copenhagen here is a good synopsis of his philosophical wranglings.
Bohr's more mature view, i.e., his view after the EPR paper, on complementarity and the interpretation of quantum mechanics may be summarized in the following points:
The interpretation of a physical theory has to rely on an experimental practice.
The experimental practice presupposes a certain pre-scientific practice of description, which establishes the norm for experimental measurement apparatus, and consequently what counts as scientific experience.
Our pre-scientific practice of understanding our environment is an adaptation to the sense experience of separation, orientation, identification and reidentification over time of physical objects.
This pre-scientific experience is grasped in terms of common categories like thing's position and change of position, duration and change of duration, and the relation of cause and effect, terms and principles that are now parts of our common language.
These common categories yield the preconditions for objective knowledge, and any description of nature has to use these concepts to be objective.
The concepts of classical physics are merely exact specifications of the above categories.
The classical concepts—and not classical physics itself—are therefore necessary in any description of physical experience in order to understand what we are doing and to be able to communicate our results to others, in particular in the description of quantum phenomena as they present themselves in experiments;
Planck's empirical discovery of the quantization of action requires a revision of the foundation for the use of classical concepts, because they are not all applicable at the same time. Their use is well defined only if they apply to experimental interactions in which the quantization of action can be regarded as negligible.
In experimental cases where the quantization of action plays a significant role, the application of a classical concept does not refer to independent properties of the object; rather the ascription of either kinematic or dynamic properties to the object as it exists independently of a specific experimental interaction is ill-defined.
The quantization of action demands a limitation of the use of classical concepts so that these concepts apply only to a phenomenon, which Bohr understood as the macroscopic manifestation of a measurement on the object, i.e. the uncontrollable interaction between the object and the apparatus.
The quantum mechanical description of the object differs from the classical description of the measuring apparatus, and this requires that the object and the measuring device should be separated in the description, but the line of separation is not the one between macroscopic instruments and microscopic objects. It has been argued in detail (Howard 1994) that Bohr pointed out that parts of the measuring device may sometimes be treated as parts of the object in the quantum mechanical description.
The quantum mechanical formalism does not provide physicists with a ‘pictorial’ representation: the ψ-function does not, as Schrödinger had hoped, represent a new kind of reality. Instead, as Born suggested, the square of the absolute value of the ψ-function expresses a probability amplitude for the outcome of a measurement. Due to the fact that the wave equation involves an imaginary quantity this equation can have only a symbolic character, but the formalism may be used to predict the outcome of a measurement that establishes the conditions under which concepts like position, momentum, time and energy apply to the phenomena.
The ascription of these classical concepts to the phenomena of measurements rely on the experimental context of the phenomena, so that the entire setup provides us with the defining conditions for the application of kinematic and dynamic concepts in the domain of quantum physics.
Such phenomena are complementary in the sense that their manifestations depend on mutually exclusive measurements, but that the information gained through these various experiments exhausts all possible objective knowledge of the object.
Bohr thought of the atom as real. Atoms are neither heuristic nor logical constructions. A couple of times he emphasized this directly using arguments from experiments in a very similar way to Ian Hacking and Nancy Cartwright much later. What he did not believe was that the quantum mechanical formalism was true in the sense that it gave us a literal (‘pictorial’) rather than a symbolic representation of the quantum world. It makes much sense to characterize Bohr in modern terms as an entity realist who opposes theory realism (Folse 1987). It is because of the imaginary quantities in quantum mechanics (where the commutation rule for canonically conjugate variable, p and q, introduces Planck's constant into the formalism by pq − qp = ih/2π) that quantum mechanics does not give us a ‘pictorial’ representation of the world. Neither does the theory of relativity, Bohr argued, provide us with a literal representation, since the velocity of light is introduced with a factor of i in the definition of the fourth coordinate in a four-dimensional manifold (CC, p. 86 and p. 105). Instead these theories can only be used symbolically to predict observations under well-defined conditions. Thus Bohr was an antirealist or an instrumentalist when it comes to theories.
In general, Bohr considered the demands of complementarity in quantum mechanics to be logically on a par with the requirements of relativity in the theory of relativity. He believed that both theories were a result of novel aspects of the observation problem, namely the fact that observation in physics is context-dependent. This again is due to the existence of a maximum velocity of propagation of all actions in the domain of relativity and a minimum of any action in the domain of quantum mechanics. And it is because of these universal limits that it is impossible in the theory of relativity to make an unambiguous separation between time and space without reference to the observer (the context) and impossible in quantum mechanics to make a sharp distinction between the behavior of the object and its interaction with the means of observation (CC, p. 105).
In emphasizing the necessity of classical concepts for the description of the quantum phenomena, Bohr was influenced by Kant or neo-Kantianism. But he was a naturalized or a pragmatized Kantian. The classical concepts are merely explications of common concepts that are already a result of our adaptation to the world. These concepts and the conditions of their application determine the conditions for objective knowledge. The discovery of the quantization of action has revealed to us, however, that we cannot apply these concepts to quantum objects as we did in classical physics. Now kinematic and dynamic properties (represented by conjugate variables) can be meaningfully ascribed to the object only in relation to some actual experimental results, whereas classical physics attributes such properties to the object regardless of whether we actually observe them or not. In other words, Bohr denied that classical concepts could be used to attribute properties to a physical world in-itself behind the phenomena, i.e. properties different from those being observed. In contrast, classical physics rests on an idealization, he said, in the sense that it assumes that the physical world has these properties in-itself, i.e. as inherent properties, independent of their actual observation.
Complementarity is first and foremost a semantic and epistemological reading of quantum mechanics that carries certain ontological implications. Bohr's view was, to phrase it in a modern philosophical jargon, that the truth conditions of sentences ascribing a certain kinematic or dynamic value to an atomic object are dependent on the apparatus involved, in such a way that these truth conditions have to include reference to the experimental setup as well as the actual outcome of the experiment. This claim is called Bohr's indefinability thesis (Murdoch 1987; Faye 1991). Hence, those physicists who accuse this interpretation of operating with a mysterious collapse of the wave function during measurements haven't got it right. Bohr accepted the Born statistical interpretation because he believed that the ψ-function has only a symbolic meaning and does not represent anything real. It makes sense to talk about a collapse of the wave function only if, as Bohr put it, the ψ-function can be given a pictorial representation, something he strongly denied.
Indeed, Bohr, Heisenberg, and many other physicists considered complementarity to be the only rational interpretation of the quantum world. They thought that it gave us the understanding of atomic phenomena in accordance with the conditions for any physical description and the possible objective knowledge of the world. Bohr believed that atoms are real, but it remains a much debated point in recent literature what sort of reality he believed them to have, whether or not they are something beyond and different from what they are observed to be. Henry Folse argues that Bohr must operate with a distinction between a phenomenal and a transcendental object. The reason is that this is the only way it makes sense to talk about the physical disturbance of the atomic object by the measuring instrument as Bohr did for a while (Folse 1985, 1994). But Jan Faye has replied that Bohr gave up the disturbance metaphor in connection with his discussion of the EPR thought-experiment because he realized that it was misleading. Moreover, there is no further evidence in Bohr's writings indicating that Bohr would attribute intrinsic and measurement-independent state properties to atomic objects (though quite unintelligible and inaccessible to us) in addition to the classical ones being manifested in measurement (Faye 1991).
http://plato.stanford.edu/entries/qm-copenhagen/
It's a well written piece whether you agree with it's conclusions or not.
And by the way I am not suggesting grey is a cult leader, but had he more ability to persuade and a load more charisma that is where he could end up. Not that all cults are bad, but most do not seem to be very realistic or self reflective, or analytical. Which seems to me to bring all sorts of perilous presumptions to the table without any sort of logical reflection on their basis.
At the end of the day I would defend his right to believe whatever he likes and to proceed in doing so, but I don't find it very pragmatic to deal in sloppy science while you are revealing your beliefs, if you say it's mostly faith then fine, if you start claiming evidence exists then this comes under sciences remit, be sure you understand the science though, or all sorts of dumb ideas become possible; he says that he believes in experiment, and I am sure he does, just how he intends to do any experiments is what leaves me less convinced, he needs the qualification and training on the subject whether he believes in it or not to play in the big boys domain, the last genius to not be playing in the big boys domain was Einstein who was lazy at college and only attained a third class degree meaning he could not attend German universities to do their equivalent of a PhD, and had to rely on the meagre wages of the patent clerk (although in physics there is less reliance on laboratory science than other of the hard sciences) at the end of the day though he was right, and being right experimentally is the only game in town, and the reason he got a Nobel prize although he deserved more than one IMHO.
He published his 3 seminal papers in 1905, it took 16 years though for him to get the recognition and at first he was lambasted mercilessly, although he did at least have the training and mathematical skill to prove his ideas although the actual experiments were done by others. Being criticised is what raises science out of the mire of human bias, without it it would perish or at least become just philosophy which is of course where it was born to some extent. Prove it or no one cares. Maths a fly on the wall documentary where you proselytise your faith, some diagram, it's worthless you need peer review to come up with any sort of ontology, let alone epistemology.
I personally see science as a very flawed system that needs revision and change, but that which does not kill it makes it stronger, just like evolution is one death after another, building a sort of life form based on what dies more so even than what lives, science evolves by critique not by gesticulation. But unlike philosophy good science requires a good deal of learning to tackle it, and that should not be a problem to those who are attacking it, it is though it seems.
And no I am not saying you need no education in philosophy to indulge in it, to any level that will convince your peers you probably do unless you are a prodigy. I just mean you need the skills to tackle science where as you can ponder the meaning of life if you are a numptie.
Greyhorn Ell wrote:You have missed your opportunity to develop a theory, and while your mind may not be closed, it is well shuttered.
Yours isn't of course, I'd say yours is deep underground, buried under a mile of concrete and a tonne of reinforced steel. Ie you're in a bunker...