Speakable and Unspeakable in Quatum Mechanics

Abstract

‘… the history of cosmic theories may without exaggeration be called a history of collective obsessions and controlled schizophrenias; and the manner in which some of the most important individual discoveries were arrived at reminds one of a sleepwalker's performance …’ This is a quotation from A. Koestler's book The Sleepwalkers . It is an account of the Copernican revolution, with Copernicus, Kepler, and Galilei as heroes. Koestler was of course impressed by the magnitude of the step made by these men. He was also fascinated by the manner in which they made it. He saw them as motivated by irrational prejudice, obstinately adhered to, making mistakes which they did not discover, which somehow cancelled at the important points, and unable to recognize what was important in their results, among the mass of details. He concluded that they were not really aware of what they were doing … sleepwalkers. I thought it would be interesting to keep Koestler's thesis in mind as we hear at this meeting about contemporary theories from contemporary theorists. For many decades now our fundamental theories have rested on the two great pillars to which this meeting is dedicated: quantum theory and relativity. We will see that the lines of research opened up by these theories remain splendidly vital. We will see that order is brought into a vast and expanding array of experimental data. We will see even a continuing ability to get ahead of the experimental data … as with the existence and masses of the W and Z mesons.