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What Was Born's Statistical Interpretation?

Published online by Cambridge University Press:  21 March 2022

Linda Wessels
Linda Wessels*
Affiliation:
Indiana University
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Extract

When Max Born introduced his statistical interpretation of wave mechanics in mid-1926, the reactions were mixed. His most recent collaborator, Pascual Jordan, was delighted; his former assistant, Werner Heisenberg, was horrified. The interpretation served as grist for Neils Bohr's philosophical mill. For Bohr's former collaborator, John Slater, it inspired a strange hybrid interpretation, a sort of statistical version of Schrödinger's electrodynamic model. What was the interpretation that engendered these varied reactions? Neither Born nor most of his contemporaries saw in it anything that even suggests the interpretation that we now associate with his name. Rather, it was another former assistant of Born's, Wolfgang Pauli, with eyes as sharp as his tongue, who saw in Born's work the idea that |Ψ(q)| represents the probability distribution for position.

Type
Part III. Quantum Theory in Historical Perspective
Information
PSA: Proceedings of the Biennial Meeting of the Philosophy of Science Association , Volume 1980 , Issue 2: Volume Two: Symposia and Invited Papers 1980 , 1980 , pp. 187 - 200
Copyright
Copyright © 1981 by the Philosophy of Science Association

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Footnotes

1

This work was supported in part by a grant from the National Science Foundation.

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