Alexei Kojevnikov, Professor of History at the University of British Columbia, gives a talk titled "Historical Debates about the Philosophy of Quantum Mechanics" on Sunday, June 26th, 2022, at 12:30 GMT.
Alexei Kojevnikov, Professor of History at the University of British Columbia, gives a talk titled "Historical Debates about the Philosophy of Quantum Mechanics" on Sunday, June 26th, 2022, at 12:30 GMT.
Abstract:
The invention of quantum mechanics around 1925-1927 produced a philosophical infighting among the main participants, with unprecedented intensity and inconsistency of competing views. The professional historiography of the quantum revolution, when it developed during the 1960s, stood at the forefront of methodological innovations in the history of science. Thomas Kuhn’s project Archive for the History of Quantum Physics pioneered the methods of oral history and collected an enormous database of primary sources, manuscripts and letters. The density of recorded arguments inspired a hope for a much more invasive history of ideas that would reconstruct and uncover the ways of scientific creativity. At the same time, political protests against the Cold War and the Vietnam war interfered with thinking about the past and prompted historians of science to ask more critical questions about the scientific establishment, its sources of funding and political patrons, which formed the conceptual vocabulary of the disciplinary/institutional approach. In 1971, the famous Forman Thesis combined the approaches from social and cultural history to analyze the impact of post-World War I ideology in Weimar Germany on the development of such fundamental concepts as quantum acausality.
This event is held by the Science Studies Department at IRIP. This event is open to the public. No registration is required.
Please join us virtually via this link.
To download Alexe Kojevnikov's abstract, see the link .