The Reception Of Unconventional Science

Seymore H Mauskopf

• Publisher: Routledge
• Year: 2019
• Print ISBN:
  9780367295455
• eBook ISBN:
  9781000305098
• Topic: Social Sciences
• Subtopic: Sociology
• Index: Social Sciences

The issue of perhaps greatest concern to historians of science today is the internalist-externalist dichotomy. This volume directly addresses that issue, at the same time providing a context for the serious study of heterodox science and scientific theories. The book consists of four studies, each of which considers the response of a scientific community to an unconventional theory or claim: the acausal physics of Heisenberg; Wegener's geological theory of continental drift; acupuncture; and the statistical argument for extrasensory perception. As they reveal a wide range of reactions to orthodoxy, the studies themselves exemplify the range of approaches the historian may use in examining scientific unconventionality.

1
The Reception of an Acausal Quantum Mechanics in Germany and Britain

Paul Forman

In considering the reception of a scientific innovation, whether unconventional or otherwise, it is useful to distinguish—as Aristotle would surely have—three phases: short term, mid-term, and long term. I will not attempt to characterize any of these phases except the first, for my discussion of the response to the advent of an acausal quantum mechanics will be limited to the short term—and that, moreover, only in Central Europe and the British Isles. In this initial phase, extending roughly two years, from the autumn of 1925 to the autumn of 1927, responses were, as I will argue, conditioned largely by prior expectations, predilections, and prejudices. This, however tautologously, I take as the defining characteristic of the immediate reception of innovations: people, and physicists, not only tend to find what they are looking for, but also fail to recognize what they are not prepared to see. Thus it is necessary to examine the period prior to the introduction of quantum mechanics quite as closely as that immediately following the event.

The issue, or unconventionality, to be examined is “the abandonment of causality” in the description of atomic processes. Causality, for the early twentieth century physicist, meant complete lawfulness of Nature, determinism. Un-realizable in practice, it was nonetheless regarded as the ideal goal of the science, and an assumption essential to its pursuit. While many macroscopic laws were even then being recognized as merely statistical regularities—notably the second law of thermodynamics—it was always supposed that the underlying microscopic events were completely deterministic.¹ The quantum mechanics of atomic structure and processes introduced by Heisenberg and Schrödinger in 1925/26 proved, on the contrary, to be a self-consistent formalism giving descriptions apparently adequate to the test of experiment, yet providing in general not deterministic, but only probablistic predictions about the state or behavior of these most fundamental physical entities.²

The reception accorded these unquestionable advances in the description of these basic processes was, as I will evidence, just what one would anticipate from the antecedants. Among German-speaking Central-European physicists (including, in particular, the originators of the theory) there was immediate recognition of, and assumption of a posture toward, the acausal aspect of the theory and its world-view implications—corresponding to the “violent dispute over the significance of the law of causality” which had been raging in Germany for some years.³ Meanwhile, in Britain there was nearly complete obliviousness to the epistemic issue exercising the Central Europeans—precisely because causality had not in the previous years been an issue for the British physicists.

Germany

In a study published some years ago I described the intellectual environment in Germany in the years immediately following her defeat in the First World War and connected the tone and content of that intellectual environment with the avowed desire among a considerable segment of the German-speaking Central-European theoretical physicists for a revolution of their science which would eliminate “causality” from its explanatory framework.⁴ in order now to connect the reception of an acausal quantum mechanics with its origins, and provide a foil to the British, it is necessary for me to summarize parts of that study.

The Intellectual Environment

Prior to and during the First World War German physicists had viewed their science, if not themselves, as closely allied with, and essential to, Germany’s technically advanced industry, and with the economic and military power which that industry ensured. Confident of their value in the eyes of the public, they were self-assured, even arrogant, vis-à-vis their colleagues in the humanities and social sciences. Then, however, Germany’s completely unexpected military and industrial collapse at the end of 1918 brought an immediate and extreme public reaction against the industrial-scientific idols.

This wave of anti-technologic Lebensphilosophie was a celebration of “life,” intuition, unmediated and unanalyzed experience; it was a rejection of reason and logical analysis because allegedly inseparable from positivism-mechanism-materialism and because, as fundamentally disintegrative, unsatisfying of the “hunger for wholeness.” Naturally, spiritualism and astrology were among its vulgar expressions. The pervasive “life” rhetoric notwithstanding, the mood of this period was distinctly pessimistic. The most popular work of Lebensphilosophie was Oswald Spengler’s Untergang des Abendlandes, in which, along with forecasts of the decline of Western civilization, many pages were spent proving that even mathematics and physics were completely culture-bound and must therefore share the general fate. In the vocabulary of Lebensphilosophie there were two characteristic words: one—Anschaulichkeit, intuitiveness—had strongly positive connotations; the other—Kausalität, causality—was emphatically pejorative. And the epitome of the abstract, unintuitive, and causal mode of apprehending reality was that of the theoretical physicist. Thus, overnight, the physicists and the mathematicians—but especially the theoretical physicists—found themselves in a thoroughly hostile intellectual environment.

Adaptations to the Environment

How did German physicists and mathematicians respond to this circumstance? At the ideological level—i.e., in their professed justifications of scientific activity, their epistemologic stance, and, generally, in their élan, their esprit, their confidence in the future of their science—there was an astonishingly fast, far-reaching, and unanimous adaptation to the Zeitgeist, to the lebensphilosophisch milieu, including an espousal of Spenglerian pessimism. The adaptive efforts did not stop at the ideological level. For as there is no clear separation between mood, motivation, and metaphysics on the one hand, and scientific activity and opinion on the other, very soon broad movements developed in mathematics and in theoretical physics to reconstruct the foundations of these disciplines. In mathematics this was “intuitionism,” a doctrine first proposed by L. E. J. Brouwer a dozen years earlier, but which seized the Germans only now in their altered milieu. In theoretical physics this was, inevitably, the renunciation of “causality."

In the seven years between the end of the First World War and the appearance of Heisenberg’ acausal matrix mechanics, an impressive group of German—including Austrian-German—physicists published proposals, arguments, or exhortations for the abandonment of causality in their science The list, in temporal order, includes Franz Exner Hermann Weyl, Richard von Mises, Walter Schottky, Walther Nernst, Erwin Schrödinger, Arnold Sommerfeld, Hans Albrecht Senftleben, and Hans Reichen-bach. I have not listed the Dane Niels Bohr, who joined this movement and necessarily had a strong influence within it, nor have I listed other physicists—in particular, Max Born—who have left us indications in private papers that they too were strongly inclined to abandon causality. In order to establish certain essential connections, and the non-existence of others, I will say a few words about Weyl and about von Mises.

Hermann Weyl, in his early thirties when the war ended, was recognized as one of the broadest and most talented mathematicians of his generation. At Göttingen circa 1910, Weyl had been on the fringes of, and had drawn his wife from, the circle of enthusiastic disciples around Edmund Husserl. In the postwar period Husserl’s doctrine of pure phenomenology degenerated into the existentialism of Heidegger and others—i.e., into one of the more esoteric of the various systems of Lebensphilosophie. The first explicit intrusion of Weyl’s philosophic proclivities into his scientific work was an attempt, begun in 1917 to put the continuum of real numbers on an intuitionist foundation. After the war Weyl became the principal champion in Germany of Brouwerian intuitionism. But it was not merely the ontologic and methodologic basis of mathematics which Weyl felt to be in urgent need of reform. Drawn by the theory of relativity to theoretical physics, Weyl was among the first to come out against causality.

Weyl came to this revolutionary position within a year of the Armistice—in opposition not only to his own views and scientific efforts prior to 1918, but also as he supposed, to the unanimous view of his colleagues. He was moved to repudiate causality not as the result of any scientific problems, but because the character of the fundamental physical theories was incompatible with the subjective, intuitive, and “for our entire experience fundamental, unidirectionality of time"—a basic tenet of existentialism. The solution which Weyl found was to rearect the classical theories on an intuitionistically conceived continuum. Thus, “the rigid pressure of natural causality relaxes, and there remains, without prejudice to the validity of natural laws, room for autonomous decisions, causally absolutely independent of one another, whose locus I consider to be the elementary quanta of matter. These ‘decisions’ are what is actually real in the world."⁵

How is this indeterminism compatible with the validity of natural laws, and in particular with that thorough-going determinism which characterizes Einstein’s theory of gravitation, and Weyl’s own extension of it to include electricity? The answer lies in the analytic character which Weyl at first attributed to physics as a whole:

Physics … does not deal at all with the materiality, the contentness, of reality; rather, what it recognizes is solely the formal constitution of reality. It has for reality the same significance as formal logic for the realm of truth.⁶

Soon, however, Weyl restricted this characterization to the laws of classical field theory, to gravity and electricity, thus allowing that now, with quanta and atomicity, physics was finally in touch with the substance of reality—an acausal reality, if Nature followed Weyl’s way.

The quanta which Weyl spoke of in his first manifesto, published in the spring of 1920, are simply elementary particles of matter; only some months later did Weyl invoke the quanta of action (or energy) of the quantum theory as compelling him to say “clearly and distinctly that physics in its present state is simply no longer capable of supporting the belief in a closed causality of material nature resting upon rigorously exact laws."⁷ Thus it is perfectly clear that the quantum theory was for Weyl a post factum rationalization for a position whose adoption represented an actualization of his own intellectual/emotional proclivities by contact with a Zeitgeist of the corresponding character.

Richard von Mises, a few years older than Weyl, was one of the leading applied mathematicians of Weimar Germany. Son of a high-ranking Jewish civil servant of the ...

Table of contents

• Cover
• Half Title
• Series Page
• Title
• Copyright
• Contents
• About the Editor and Authors
• Introduction
• 1 The Reception of an Acausal Quantum Mechanics in Germany and Britain
• 2 The Reception and Acceptance of Continental Drift Theory as a Rational Episode in the History of Science
• 3 Reception of Acupuncture by the Scientific Community: From Scorn to a Degree of Interest
• 4 The Controversy over Statistics in Parapsychology 1934–1938
• 5 Discussion: On the Reception of Unconventional Scientific Claims