“On the side of physics, there were a few key figures in Oxford who realized, in all probability unlike the majority of their colleagues in the physics department, that physics without interpretation is only part of the story, and that theories like quantum mechanics need careful foundational reflection.”

—  Harvey Brown (philosopher)

Physics and Philiosophy in Oxford: a prosperous example of interdisciplinarity, in [Innovation and interdisciplinarity in the university, EDIPUCRS, 2007, 8-574-30677-0, 304 http://books.google.com/books?id=-OGr007TQ0AC&printsec=frontcover#PPA304,M1]

Adopted from Wikiquote. Last update June 3, 2021. History

Help us to complete the source, original and additional information

Do you have more details about the quote "On the side of physics, there were a few key figures in Oxford who realized, in all probability unlike the majority of …" by Harvey Brown (philosopher)?
Harvey Brown (philosopher) photo
Harvey Brown (philosopher) 2
Philosopher of physics 1950

Related quotes

“Physics is by no means "finished". But the part of it that explains almost everything in the universe—including us—is finished, and much of it has been finished for a century or more. This includes the physics that we are going to need. Nothing at the unsettled frontiers of physics challenges the parts we're going to make use of. What's more, the physics we need is easy to understand, certainly far easier than quantum mechanics, general relativity, or string theory.”

Alexander Rosenberg (1946) American philosopher

The Atheist's Guide to Reality (2011)

Steven Weinberg photo

“Considering the pervasive importance of quantum mechanics in modern physics, it is odd how rarely one hears of efforts to test quantum mechanics experimentally with high precision.…The trouble is that it is very difficult to find any logically consistent generalization of quantum mechanics. One obvious target for generalization is the linearity of quantum mechanics, but if we arbitrarily add nonlinear terms to the Schrodinger equation, how do we know that the theory we obtain will have a sensible physical interpretation? At least in part, it is the dearth of generalized versions of quantum mechanics that has made it so hard to plan experimental tests of quantum mechanics.”

Steven Weinberg (1933) American theoretical physicist

"Testing Quantum Mechanics" http://www.sciencedirect.com/science/article/pii/0003491689902765, Annals of Physics (1989)

Alain Aspect photo

“Certainly we do not need quantum mechanics for macroscopic objects, which are well described by classical physics – this is the reason why quantum mechanics seems so foreign to our everyday existence.”

Alain Aspect (1947) French physicist

"Introduction: John Bell and the second quantum revolution" (2004)

Steven Weinberg photo

“The development of quantum mechanics in the 1920s was the greatest advance in physical science since the work of Isaac Newton. It was not easy; the ideas of quantum mechanics present a profound departure from ordinary human intuition. Quantum mechanics has won acceptance through its success. It is essential to modern atomic, molecular, nuclear, and elementary particle physics, and to a great deal of chemistry and condensed matter physics as well.”

Steven Weinberg (1933) American theoretical physicist

Preface
Lectures on Quantum Mechanics (2012, 2nd ed. 2015)

Nick Herbert photo

“Quantum physics emerged from the Stone Age with an embarrassment of riches - three quantum theories, each claiming to explain the world. As it turned out, all three were right.”

Nick Herbert (1936) American physicist

Source: Quantum Reality - Beyond The New Physics, Chapter 3, Quantum Theory takes Charge, p. 42

Hermann Weyl photo

“A new development began for relativity theory after 1925 with its absorption into quantum physics. The first great success was scored by Dirac's quantum mechanical equations of the electron, which introduced a new sort of quantities, the spinors, besides the vectors and tensors into our physical theories. …But difficulties of the gravest kind turned up when one passed from one electron or photon to the interaction among an indeterminate number of such particles. In spite of several advances a final solution of this problem is not yet in sight and may well require a deep modification of the foundation of quantum mechanics, such as would account in the same basic manner for the elementary electric charge e as relativity theory and our present quantum mechanics account for c and h.”

Hermann Weyl (1885–1955) German mathematician

Preface to the First American Printing (1950) Note: see Paul Dirac, The Principles of Quantum Mechanics (1947)
Space—Time—Matter (1952)

Newton Lee photo

“The mysterious universe cannot be explained from one angle alone; instead it requires multiple paradigms including Newtonian physics, Einstein’s Theory of Relativity, and Quantum Mechanics.”

Newton Lee American computer scientist

Google It: Total Information Awareness, 2016

“Quantum field theory is the basic tool to understand the physics of the elementary constituents of matter. … It is both a very powerful and a very precise framework: using it we can describe physical processes in a range of energies going from the few millions electrovolts typical of nuclear physics to the thousands of billions of the Large Hadron Collider (LHC). And all this with astonishing precision.”

Luis Álvarez-Gaumé Spanish physicist

Source: An Invitation to Quantum Field Theory (2012), Ch. 1 : Why Do We Need Quantum Field Theory After All?

Paul Dirac photo

“The underlying physical laws necessary for the mathematical theory of a large part of physics and the whole of chemistry are”

Paul Dirac (1902–1984) theoretical physicist

Proceedings of the Royal Society of London. Series A, Containing Papers of a Mathematical and Physical Character, Vol. 123, No. 792 http://doi.org/10.1098/rspa.1929.0094 (6 April 1929)
Context: The underlying physical laws necessary for the mathematical theory of a large part of physics and the whole of chemistry are thus completely known, and the difficulty is only that the exact application of these laws leads to equations much too complicated to be soluble. It therefore becomes desirable that approximate practical methods of applying quantum mechanics should be developed, which can lead to an explanation of the main features of complex atomic systems without too much computation.

Fritjof Capra photo

“While the new physics was developing in the 20th century, the mechanistic Cartesian world view and the principles of Newtonian physics maintained their strong influence on Western scientific thinking, and even today many scientists still hold to the mechanistic paradigm, although physicists themselves have gone beyond it.
However, the new conception of the universe that has emerged from modern physics does not mean that Newtonian physics is wrong, or that quantum theory, or relativity theory, is right. Modern science has come to realize that all scientific theories are approximations to the true nature of reality; and that each theory is valid for a certain range of phenomena.”

Fritjof Capra book The Turning Point

Source: The Turning Point (1982), p. 93.

Related topics