What Is Real?: The Unfinished Quest for the Meaning of Quantum Physics

by Adam Becker

Yet philosophers have known for more than half a century that the positivism underpinning statements like these is fundamentally flawed. And philosophers of physics today almost unanimously reject the Copenhagen interpretation. (Logical empiricism of a sort has made a comeback since 1980, but scientific realism is still the standard position among philosophers of physics—and even the most staunch defenders of empiricism today agree that the sort of naive positivism deployed in standard defenses of Copenhagen doesn’t work.) How have physicists failed to get the memo from philosophers after all this time? Part of the problem is that physicists generally don’t know much about philosophy. There is a massive asymmetry between the two fields: while philosophers usually take physics very seriously indeed—philosophers of physics are mathematically conversant in physics and often have advanced degrees in both fields—physicists are rarely trained in philosophy at all. Despite their ignorance of philosophy (or more likely because of their ignorance), some physicists are openly contemptuous of the subject. “Philosophy is dead,” declared Stephen Hawking in 2011. “Philosophers have not kept up with modern developments in science. Particularly physics.” And according to Neil deGrasse Tyson, studying philosophy “can really mess you up.” “Pretty much after quantum mechanics… philosophy has basically parted ways from the frontier of the physical sciences,” Tyson claimed. “I’m disappointed b...