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The Copenhagen Interpretation

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Mind, Matter, and Quantum Mechanics

Part of the book series: The Frontiers Collection ((FRONTCOLL))

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Abstract

Scientists of the late 1920s, led by Bohr and Heisenberg, proposed a conception of nature radically different from that of their predecessors. The new conception, which grew out of efforts to comprehend the apparently irrational behavior of nature in the realm of quantum effects, was not simply a new catalog of the elementary spacetime realities and their modes of operation. It was essentially a rejection of the presumption that nature could be understood in terms of elementary spacetime realities. According to the new view, the complete description of nature at the atomic level was given by probability functions that referred not to underlying microscopic spacetime realities but rather to the macroscopic objects of sense experience. The theoretical structure did not extend down and anchor itself on fundamental microscopic spacetime realities. Instead it turned back and anchored itself in the concrete sense realities that form the basis of social life.

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© 1993 Springer-Verlag Berlin Heidelberg

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Stapp, H.P. (1993). The Copenhagen Interpretation. In: Mind, Matter, and Quantum Mechanics. The Frontiers Collection. Springer, Berlin, Heidelberg. https://doi.org/10.1007/978-3-662-08765-7_3

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  • DOI: https://doi.org/10.1007/978-3-662-08765-7_3

  • Publisher Name: Springer, Berlin, Heidelberg

  • Print ISBN: 978-3-662-08767-1

  • Online ISBN: 978-3-662-08765-7

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