ESHS/HSS Annual Meeting

The Philosophy within Physics: Pauli and Heisenberg on Schopenhauer and Goethe

• In Event: Intersections between History and Philosophy of Physics

English Abstract

The development of the theory of quantum mechanics marked a turning point in the philosophical interpretation of physical theory. In the traditional narrative, the architects of the theory are said to have banished the last vestiges of philosophical intuition from the foundations of physics. Through the discovery of the fundamentally indeterministic nature of the quantum world, these physicists are credited with reorienting physical inquiry toward a more direct reliance on empirical facts, which no longer required (or were even amenable to) any intuitive picture or physical mechanism.

However, this story is far from the facts. By the end of the 1920s, the founders of quantum mechanics had settled on a basic interpretation of quantum theory, but one which they considered to be incomplete, as central problems (e.g., the role of the observer in physical inquiry) remained unexplained. In the search for new physics, they turned to forms of speculative philosophy, which they thought might contain the greatest promise for novel insight.

In this paper, I will trace Wolfgang Pauli and Werner Heisenberg’s decades-long attempt to provide a speculative philosophical foundation for the future development of the theory of quantum mechanics through the philosophy of Arthur Schopenhauer and Johann Wolfgang von Goethe. This work aims to not only draw attention to this important, yet largely unexamined, chapter in the history of science, but also to explore the essential role that these speculative philosophical studies played in the formation of a new understanding of the nature of intuitive insight and rational knowledge within mid-20th-century theoretical physics.

Author

• Noah Stemeroff, University of Bristol