The Technical Problem Complex

Abstract

The dialogue between Bohr and Pauli was to be central to the development of the new quantum mechanics, but it could be so only once it had been incorporated into the technical problem complex of quantum theory, and this was no easy matter. Pauli’s ideas, developed outside the quantum context, seemed strange to some of his colleagues and could have little impact until applied to detailed quantum problems. Even Bohr’s views, though developed in the quantum context, lacked the precision conferred by concrete application. Moreover, there was a further complicating factor in the anti-causal pressures of the Weimar intellectual milieu. That such pressures existed, were strong, and were recognised and to some extent accommodated to by German physicists in the early 1920s has been clearly demonstrated by Forman.¹ And at first sight their existence would seem to offer support for Bohr’s views on the absence of causality in quantum theory. But so far as the mainstream quantum physicists were concerned, the pressures do not seem to have been anything like so strong as has sometimes been suggested, and their existence tends historically to conceal as much as it reveals.² Not only for Bohr and Pauli but also for most of the main quantum atomic physics community, causality was an issue, but only a secondary one, a decision on which was to be derived from other more fundamental considerations.