K. V. Laurikainen . The Message of the Atoms Essays on Wolfgang Pauli and the Unspeakable Springer Berlin Heidelberg New York Barcelona Budapest Hong Kong London Milan Paris Santa Clara Singapore Tokyo KALERVO V. LAURIKAINEN The Message ofAtne r\.toms Essays on Wolfgang Pauli and the Unspeakable , Springer Prof. Kalervo V. Laurikainen Keiotie4C FIN-01820 Klaukkala, Finland The first Finnish edition, «Atomien viesti", was published by Yliopistopaino/Helsinki University Press in 1994 ISBN -13:978-3-642-64457-3 Springer-Verlag Berlin Heidelberg New York Library of Congress Cataloging-in Publication Data. Laurikainen, Kalervo Vihtori. The message of the atoms: Wolfgang Pauli and the unspeakable 1 K. V. Laurikainen. p. cm. ISBN-13:978-3-642-64457-3 e-ISBN-13:978-3-642-60560-4 DOl: 10.1007/978-3-642-60560-4 1. Quantum theory. 2. Physics - Philosophy. 3. Pauli, Wolfgang, 1900-1958. I. Title. QCI74.12.L39 1996 530.1'2-dc20 96-43199 CIP This work is subject to copyright. 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Cover design: design & production GmbH, Heidelberg Typesetting: Data conversion by Text & Grafik GmbH, Heidelberg SPIN 10543856 55/3142-543210 -Printed on acid-free paper Prologue This book is an attempt to interpret the message of the atoms as Wolfgang Pauli interpreted it, but perhaps in a way which is easier to understand. Errors are to be ascribed to the author, not to Pauli. Man can guide another only to the shore of the Styx. Sometimes one can feel, however, that Pauli has found a scenic place from which something can be dimly seen even in the world beyond. In the chapter "Numinosum" the story about what I see from this scenic place begins. "They went a little too far in the seventeenth century" (From a letter of Wolfgang Pauli to Markus Fierz, October 13, 1951.) Preface When I meet a difficult problem, I begin to go around it, approaching it again and again from different directions. If I persistently continue these approaches, it can happen that no problem remains. (RolfNevanlinna, in a private discussion.) In 1976, after a mainly administrative period of some 15 years, I spent a couple of months at CERN, working in the Pauli Collection. When I found the Pauli-Fierz correspondence, I had the intuitive feeling that there was the key: that "it was an objective description, and that it was the only possible objective description" for the mysteries of quantum mechanics. Here I have cited Bohr in his 'last interview' (see Chap. 7), which I became acquainted with only later, but I was immediately convinced that Pauli's view was more profound than anything else I had read about in quantum mechanics. However, nowadays the investigation of the foundations of quantum theory is dominated by 'realism', which means that the influence of the psyche on our conception of reality is ignored. This book is an attempt to show that this is not possible in quantum mechanics. Contrary to Bohr, Pauli did not avoid the discussion of ontological implications of quantum mechanics, and he found in e.G. Jung's unus mundus a psychological counterpart to his views. Pauli writes of a cosmic order which is beyond the distinction of the physical and the psychic aspects of reality - it means a fusion of the 'outer world' and the 'inner world'. Such considerations led Pauli to the borderland between knowledge and belief, and perhaps this explains the repression of his philosophical thought among colleagues in physics. A new, quaternarian, view of science was characteristic of Pauli in his later years. This is in harmony with the holistic nature of quantum theory. The quaternarian attitude emphasizes interdisciplinary wholes, while the present, 'trinitarian', science results in more and more isolated disciplines. Important is a harmonious relation between science and religion, in the spirit of Pauli's remark in his letter of August 12, 1948, to Fierz: Ich meine nicht "Religion innerhalb der Physik" und auch nicht "Physik innerhalb der Religion" - denn beides ware ja "einseitig" - sondern Einordnung beider in ein Ganzes. [I do not mean "religion within physics", nor do 1 mean "physics inside of religion") since either one would certainly be "one-sided") but rather 1 mean the placing of both of them within a whole.] VIII In the present science-religion dialogue, Pauli's view opens an important perspective which is essentially different from the 'realistic' approaches to quantum mechanics mentioned above. I have the feeling that these trends in Pauli's thought correspond to the present needs of cultural development. Therefore, Pauli's philosophy should be better known, not only among physicists and philosophers but within a much wider audience. Perhaps the time is dawning when complementarity will be taught in elementary schools - as Bohr once predicted. This book is an attempt to speak about the Unspeakable. Therefore it is not 'linear', proceeding consistently from a certain beginning to a certain end. Rather, it is a collection of approaches towards the Unvisible - in the hope that the reader will step by step begin to see a structure in reality which is beyond our reach. This structure gives direction to our endeavors. Part II, "Facts and Interpretations", differs essentially in its style from the other three parts: it is more like a customary scientific treatise. It is, in fact, a translation of four chapters from another book, Tieteella on rajansa (Science Has Its Limits), and three of these chapters were originally written for scientific journals. The aim of Part II is to show that the philosophy of the Copenhagen interpretation is generally misunderstood today. In Chap. 5, citations from original articles (partly in German) are used for documentation. I hope to convince the reader of the incompatibility of quantum mechanics with 'realism' if this is understood in the usual physical sense, without incorporating consciousness into the conception of reality. If this incompatibility is not understood, the 'mysteries' of quantum mechanics cannot be eliminated - other than by theories that can be neither verified nor falsified. It is time to reject the 'realistic' misunderstandings and to listen again to Bohr and Pauli. Acknowledgements I wish to express my gratitude to a very active group of people in the Finnish Society for Natural Philosophy for the innumerable discussions concerning problems related to the material in this book. Without these Thursday discussions, it would have been difficult to really learn the new way of thinking needed in these questions. I am especially grateful to Professor Jussi Rastas for his competent and careful criticism. I wish to thank Virginia Nikkila, B.A., for the revision of the English language in most chapters of this book and Karri Sunnarborg, M.A., for technical help in drawings. To my publisher, Springer-Verlag, I am grateful for keen interest, especially to Professor W. Beiglbock, Dr. Angela Lahee, Ms. Antje Endemann, and Ms. Ulrike Drechsler for many good proposals in the editorial work. Klaukkala July 1996 K.V. Laurikainen IX Contents Introduction ......................................................... 1 Part I Problems ..................................................... 5 1. Purgatory ................................................... 7 2. The Atoms Have the Floor ...................................... 15 3. Scientism ................................................... 25 4. The Power of Materialism ..................................... 35 Part II Facts and Interpretations ....................................... 39 5. Ontology Implied by the Copenhagen Interpretation ............... 41 Original Texts of the Quotations Referred to in Chap. 5 ............. 48 6. Basic Features in Wolfgang Pauli's Philosophy .................... 53 7. On the Meaning of Complementarity ............................ 61 8. On the Criticism by Natural Scientists ........................... 71 Part III Creation ..................................................... 93 9. Freedom .................................................... 95 10. Numinosum ............................................... 115 11. The World of Spirit .......................................... 121 12. The Problem of the Fourth ................................... 133 Part IV The Outline of Reality ........................................ 141 13. The Psychophysical World ................................... 143 14. The Reality Beyond .......................................... 153 15. Reality and Values .......................................... 163 16. Hubris and Punishment (A Personal Vision) .................... 171 Appendix: Italian Guests ............................................ 183 References ......................................................... 193 Index ............................................................. 199 Introduction Seven decades ago, between the years 1924 and 1927, the most wonderful theory that the human intellect has created to date - excluding purely mathematical discoveries - was brought into being. Bohr's atomic model, where electrons were supposed to be moving around the atomic nucleus according to mechanical laws and were bound to the nucleus by an electric force, was found to be unsatisfactory in many respects. There was no doubt, it is true, that the road into the atomic world which Niels Bohr had found in 1913 was right, but this road had been followed to its end, as Bohr himself had shown in his 1922 lecture series in Gottingen, at the famous 'Bohr Festival'. A promising new idea was found in 1924 by Louis de Broglie, when he, in his doctoral thesis, pointed out that the strange dualism characteristic of electromagnetic radiation could perhaps also apply to different kinds of particle rays, i.e., to the motion of particles. It is well known that light is a form of electromagnetic wave but, on the other hand, Max Planck and Albert Einstein showed at the beginning of this century that light is composed of small energy quanta, of a kind of light particle (photon) which has a certain momentum and energy just like a small body. Thus, light seems to have two different faces which appear according to the method which is used when investigating light phenom ena. This dualistic nature is also characteristic of particle rays, i.e., of particle streams composed of fast-moving material particles. Due to the endeavors of Werner Heisenberg, Erwin Schrodinger, and many other atomic scientists, quantum mechanics was created: a theory which gives a consistent description of all objects of the atomic world describing them as both particles and waves, whichever fits the circumstances. A difficulty remained in the physical interpretation of quantum mechanics. Close collaboration between mathematical theorizing and experimental observation had produced an excellent theory which was later verified in the most diverse microphysical problems. But what, indeed, are those 'matter waves' which are inseparably associated with the 'particles' of the microworld? The inter pretation of matter waves became an especially difficult problem which actually has to be deliberated even today. Nature had guided physicists along an unexpec ted road, and people still have widely different opinions about the lesson nature teaches us here. The problem is whether we are able to correctly interpret the message of nature. K. V. Laurikainen, The Message of the Atoms © Springer-Verlag Berlin Heidelberg 1997 2 Introduction In his poetic narrative Aniara, the Swedish poet Harry Martinson tellingly describes the situation in physics in 1926: Uppfinnaren var sjalv fullstandigt slagen den dag han fann aU halften av den mima han funnit upp hlg bortom analysen. (Martinson 1956, the 9th song) [The discoverer himself was totally petrified I when he found that one half of I what he had found was beyond analysis.] In their intensive discussions, which continued uninterrupted over several months, Bohr and Heisenberg at last found a solution which is called the Copenhagen interpretation of quantum mechanics and which Bohr presented in September 1927 at a conference in Como, Italy. Wolfgang Pauli participated in an essential way in its formulation. Unexpectedly, the interpretation was generally accepted, although most physicists have never quite understood the philosophy behind it. The Copenhagen interpretation has, in any case, established the language which is generally used when quantum mechanics is applied. It is de scribed here in broad outline in Chap. 2 "The Atoms Have the Floor." Matter waves are interpreted as probability waves, and this causes difficulties with respect to realism. It turns out that the reason for these difficulties is that the influence of the observer on the experimental results cannot be eliminated. We can get exact knowledge about objects in the outer world only within a given conceptual framework (theory). Nature gives a definite answer only to a definite question, and this presupposes a certain system of concepts. A quite new, unexpected feature is that the properties of a microsystem which are found in different experiments often are mutually inconsistent. Bohr has called this feature, characteristic of the microworld, complementarity. The mutually inconsistent results of different experiments must be accepted as complementary descriptions of reality which itself remains abstract. In his analysis of observations, Pauli came to the conclusion that physics and psychology must be understood as complementary sciences which only together are able to describe essential features of reality. This is a new point of view, and this book tries to approach problems of reality according to this view. So far, the view has been excluded from physics because physicists - and, in general, philosophers as well - reject ideas which introduce 'irrational elements' into the scientific world view. Quantum mechanics seems to guide us, explicitly, to such a perspective. It presupposes the abandonment of the Cartesian dualism which is so deeply rooted in Western thought. There is the risk that the message of the atoms becomes distorted because of hidden presupposi tions based on Cartesian dualism. Physicists have tried to find the fundamental laws of nature by analyzing ever smaller structures ever more exactly. Characteristic of the belief in a deterministic