The Defeat of Reason

bostonreview.net/science-nature-philosophy-religion/tim-maudlin-defeat-reason

June 1, 2018

Philosophy & Religion

Two new books—one on quantum physics, one on Thomas Kuhn—seek to reestablish the authority
of reason and evidence, each in its own way. But it is the most difficult of all tasks. How do you
convince a whole culture that it is deluded?

Tim Maudlin

Image: John Tenniel

You can now listen to a reading of Tim Maudlin’s essay! Audio courtesy of curio.io.

What Is Real?: The Unfinished Quest for the Meaning of Quantum Physics
Adam Becker
Basic Books, $32 (cloth)
The Ashtray: (Or the Man Who Denied Reality)
Errol Morris
University of Chicago Press, $30 (cloth)

People are gullible. Humans can be duped by liars and conned by frauds; manipulated by rhetoric
and beguiled by self-regard; browbeaten, cajoled, seduced, intimidated, flattered, wheedled,
inveigled, and ensnared. In this respect, humans are unique in the animal kingdom.

Aristotle emphasizes another characteristic. Humans alone, he tells us, have logos: reason. Man,
according to the Stoics, is zoön logikon, the reasoning animal. But on reflection, the first set of
characteristics arises from the second. It is only because we reason and think and use language that
we can be hoodwinked.

Not only can people be led astray, most people are. If the devout Christian is right, then committed
Hindus and Jews and Buddhists and atheists are wrong. When so many groups disagree, the
majority must be mistaken. And if the majority is misguided on just this one topic, then almost
everyone must be mistaken on some issues of great importance. This is a hard lesson to learn,
because it is paradoxical to accept one’s own folly. You cannot at the same time believe something
and recognize that you are a mug to believe it. If you sincerely judge that it is raining outside, you
cannot at the same time be convinced that you are mistaken in your belief. A sucker may be born
every minute, but somehow that sucker is never oneself.

A sucker may be born every minute, but somehow that sucker is never oneself.

The two books under consideration here bring the paradox home, each in its own way. Adam
Becker’s What Is Real? chronicles the tragic side of a crowning achievement of reason, quantum
physics. The documentarian Errol Morris gives us The Ashtray, a semi-autobiographical tale of the
supremely influential The Structure of Scientific Revolutions (1962) by Thomas S. Kuhn. Both are
spellbinding intellectual adventures into the limits, fragility, and infirmity of human reason.
Becker covers the sweep of history, from the 1925 birth of the “new” quantum physics up through
the present day. Morris’s tale is more picaresque. Anecdotes, cameos, interviews, historical
digressions, sly sidenotes, and striking illustrations hang off a central spine that recounts critical
episodes in the history of analytic philosophy.

Quantum theory first. Becker does not discuss the earliest signs that something was amiss in the
theory of light and matter, but the fundamentals are well known. The first hints of particle-like
behavior in electromagnetic waves were dropped by Max Planck in his treatment of blackbody
radiation, the light given off as a body heats up. In 1905 Albert Einstein took a decisive step with
his analysis of the photoelectric effect, the current that flows in certain metals exposed to light.
Einstein postulated that the light wave delivers its energy to the metal in small packets or quanta.
The energy per packet varies with the color (frequency) of the light, and the number of packets
with the brightness (amplitude). Below a critical frequency, no current flows, no matter how bright
the light. Above that frequency, some flows no matter how dim.
Light is not just absorbed by matter; it is also emitted. The emission from atoms occurs at only
certain precise frequencies. These constitute atomic spectra, which permit us to determine how
much of each element there is in a distant star.

In 1913 Niels Bohr devised the Bohr atom. Electrons orbit the nucleus just like planets orbiting the
sun. Only certain orbits—which Bohr gave rules for—are available to the electron, and when an
electron jumps from a higher orbit to a lower one, it emits light of a frequency determined by the
energies of the orbits. The challenge was figuring out how these quantum jumps happen. Over the
next decade, Bohr failed to find any precise electron motions. The spectra and intensities of
emitted light never came out right. This is the period of the “old” quantum theory.

Becker’s main historical narrative begins dramatically at the October 1927 Fifth Solvay
International Conference in Brussels. In 1925 Werner Heisenberg had invented matrix mechanics.
Heisenberg’s mathematical formalism got the predictions that Bohr had been seeking. But the
central mathematical objects used in his theory were matrices, rectangular arrays of numbers. The
predictions came out with wonderful accuracy, but that still left the old puzzle in place: how does
the electron get from one orbit to another? You can stare at a matrix from morning to night, but
you will not get a clue.

Bohr took an unexpected approach to this question: instead of asking if the theory was too young
to be fully understood, he declared that the theory was complete; you cannot visualize what the
electron is doing because the microworld of the electron is not, in principle, visualizable
(anschaulich). It is unvisualizable (unanschaulich). In other words, the fault lay not in the theory,
it lay in us. Bohr took to calling any visualizable object classical. Quantum theory had passed
beyond the bounds of classical physics: there is no further classical story to tell. This became a
central tenet of the Copenhagen interpretation of quantum theory.

Imagine Bohr’s motivation to adopt this extreme conclusion. For over a decade, he had been
seeking exact, visualizable electron trajectories and failed. He concluded that his failure was rooted
in the impossibility of the task.

But in 1926 Erwin Schrödinger produced a mathematically different theory, wave mechanics.
Schrödinger’s mathematics was essentially just the classical mathematics of waves. The atomic
system was not designated by a matrix, it was described by a wavefunction. And waves may not be
particles, but they are certainly visualizable objects from everyday life.

What is Real? and The Ashtray are spellbinding intellectual adventures into the limits, fragility,
and infirmity of human reason.

Schrödinger’s theory proved easier to use than Heisenberg’s, in part because it is more intuitive.
Furthermore, first Schrödinger and then Paul Dirac proved that the two theories are equivalent. In
physics any two theories that make precisely the same observable predictions are observably
equivalent. And one of the predominant philosophical views of the age—logical positivism—held
that any two observably equivalent theories are really one and the same theory. That is, although
the two theories may seem to be giving completely different accounts of the world, they are not.
The total content of an empirical theory consists in the predictions it makes about the observable.
No more and no less.

Logical positivism is a very attractive view for people who do not want to worry about what they
cannot observe. It is ultimately a theory about meaning, about the content of a theory. According to
the positivists, a theory says no more than its observable consequences.

Logical positivism has been killed many times over by philosophers. But no matter how many
stakes are driven through its heart, it arises unbidden in the minds of scientists. For if the content
of a theory goes beyond what you can observe, then you can never, in principle, be sure that any
theory is right. And that means there can be interminable arguments about which theory is right
that cannot be settled by observation.

So the situation in 1926 was rather confused. Matrix mechanics and wave mechanics were, in some
sense, thought to be the same theory, differently expressed. But if you use the mathematics to
derive a certain matrix yet have no notion of how the physical situation associated with the matrix
would appear, how do you get a prediction about what you will observe? And wave mechanics is
not much better off. Waves are certainly visualizable, but the world we live in, the world of
laboratory experiments, does not present itself as made of waves. It presents itself, if anything, as
made of particles. How do we get from waves to recognizable everyday stuff?

This, in a nutshell, is the central conundrum of quantum mechanics: how does the mathematical
formalism used to represent a quantum system make contact with the world as given in
experience? This is commonly called the measurement problem, although the name is misleading.
It might better be called the where-in-the-theory-is-the-world-we-live-in problem.

For Bohr and Heisenberg, the measurement problem is how the unvisualizable can influence the
observable (and hence visualizable). For Schrödinger it is how waves can constitute solid objects
such as cats. In wave mechanics, the little planetary electron of the old quantum theory gets
smeared out into a cloud surrounding the nucleus. If quantum mechanics provides a complete
description of the electron—as Bohr insisted—this diffuseness is not merely a reflection of our
ignorance about where the electron is, it is a characteristic of the electron itself. As Schrödinger
memorably wrote to Albert Einstein, “There is a difference between a shaky or out-of-focus
photograph and a snapshot of clouds and fog banks.” This unexpected (but perfectly visualizable)
mistiness of the electron was fine by Schrödinger: after all, we have no direct experience of
electrons to contradict it. But the dynamics of the theory could not confine the smeariness to
microscopic scale. In certain experimental situations, the haziness of the electron would get
amplified up to everyday scales. The electron that is nowhere-in-particular gives birth to a cat that
is no-state-of-health-in-particular. Schrödinger found this result manifestly absurd: something
must have gone wrong somewhere in the physics.

For his part, Bohr insisted—as he had to—that the description of an experimental procedure and its
outcome be classical, which is to say visualizable. Otherwise, you could not tell what experiment
was done and how it came out. But at some point, if we are probing the microscopic realm, we
must reach the unvisualizable. And the interaction between the two must itself be unvisualizable,
since one part is. So all one can ask for is a mathematical rule: if an interaction occurs, what are the
probabilities of the various possible classical outcomes? There is no more to be sought from
quantum theory than these numbers. And matrix mechanics typically does not provide a precise
prediction but a set of probabilities for different outcomes. The deterministic world of classical
physics has been lost.

Which is all well and good, so long as you know what counts as the point of interaction between a
quantum system and a classical one. But this Bohr could never nail down. We are left with the
question: under what conditions does such an interaction (a measurement of the quantum state)
occur? Do we need a human observer? Some conscious detection device, even if not human? Will a
mouse do? Some detection device, even if not conscious? The Copenhagen interpretation never
answered.

For Schrödinger, we get a different problem. We can visualize the microworld: it is a wave. But at
some point, waves must manage to appear as particles, things located at definite positions in space.
And just as the Copenhagenists advert to measurement here, so too does Schrödinger. The sudden
change from an electron wavefunction being spread all over space to being located at a point is
called “the collapse of the wavefunction.” So for wave mechanics, the measurement problem
becomes: When and how does the wavefunction collapse? And the tentative answer is, upon
measurement.

By the time of the Fifth Solvay Conference, much of this doctrine had been worked out. And along
with Bohr, Heisenberg, and Schrödinger, the conference attracted our other protagonist, Einstein.

Einstein demanded a clear account of what is going on in the physical world. Bohr thought that the
key to quantum mechanics was the realization that there is no such thing.

Einstein was the great anti-positivist. His position is often called realism, but a better name is
perhaps common sense. Einstein believed that there is a real, objective, mind-independent
physical world, and that the goal of physics is to describe that world. Mere prediction, no matter
how precise, is not enough: explanation is the goal. Further, he said, you do not start out knowing
what you can observe and then building the theory to predict certain observations. Rather, it is the
theory itself that tells you what you can observe.

So Einstein and Bohr were polar opposites in their approach to physics. Einstein demanded a clear
and comprehensible account of what is going on in the physical world—at all scales—in space and
time. Bohr thought that the key to quantum mechanics was the realization that no such thing could
be had.

Becker sets up the Solvay showdown skillfully. In the conventional story, Einstein, once the radical,
has aged into a conservative who cannot abide the idea that God plays dice. Desperate for
determinism, he challenges Bohr with a thought experiment designed to show the untenability of
Bohr’s contention that you cannot do better—even in principle—than probabilistic predictions. The
necessity of probabilism was encoded in the Heisenberg uncertainty relations, which assert that
the better one can predict one aspect of a system (e.g., its position), the worse one can predict
another (e.g., its momentum). Einstein’s thought experiment comes as a shock, but after a tense
night Bohr hits on the solution and refutes Einstein with his own brainchild: the general theory of
relativity. A showdown for the ages. Einstein, defeated, drifts into crankhood, never more doing
significant physics.

Here Becker begins his exposé. He shows that every single detail of the standard account of the
Solvay Conference is untrue. Einstein was not concerned with saving determinism. His example
was not designed to refute the uncertainty relation. And most critically, Bohr did not win, he lost.

Thus begins the great debunking. None of this is news to historians and philosophers of physics.
The true account has been worked out by many people whom Becker cites. But he has done
prodigious research and created a powerful narrative.

As we noted, Einstein was not centrally bothered by the indeterminism of quantum mechanics.
What vexed him—as he said repeatedly—was the nonlocality, or, in his pungent phrase, the spooky
action at a distance (spukhafte Fernwirkung) in quantum mechanics. Einstein put his finger on
this right away and never took it off.

Consider the collapse of the wavefunction in Schrödinger’s wave mechanics. If an electron-wave is

channeled through a very narrow hole, when it emerges it will spread out in all directions like a
circular undulation in water. But a hemispheric screen constructed to catch the electron does not
reveal anything spread out: there is a single bright flash, as of a particle hitting the screen. The
transition from extended wave to localized particle requires the collapse of the wavefunction. What
bothered Einstein was that the sudden appearance of the flash at one spot implied that there could
not be a flash at any other spot, no matter how far away. Somehow, all the distant spread-out parts
of the wavefunction instantaneously disappear. Faster than light. Spooky action at a distance.

Einstein saw that the phenomena themselves—as distinct from Schrödinger’s theory with its
wavefunctions—did not require anything spooky. All you had to believe is that the electron was
always in some precise location, of which we are ignorant, and takes a humdrum path from the
source to the screen, causing a flash. But because quantum mechanics does not specify the
location, accepting this picture demands rejecting the completeness of quantum mechanics. The
Copenhagen interpretation cannot be the final story.

Bohr never came to grips with this argument. Indeed, it is unclear whether he ever understood it.

But while Einstein won—and would continue to win—all the logical battles, Bohr was decisively
winning the propaganda war. The Copenhagen doctrine of the completeness of quantum theory
and the inescapability of fundamental chance spread, enforced by Bohr and Heisenberg and the
rest of the Copenhagen school. Behind the scenes, the Copenhagenists did not agree with each
other, but to the world they presented a unified front. Meanwhile, Einstein and Schrödinger both
rejected Bohr, but they also bickered with each other.

Here is Einstein’s own description of Copenhagen: “The theory reminds me a little of the system of
delusions of an exceedingly intelligent paranoiac.” Philosopher Imre Lakatos gave this later
assessment:
 In the new, post-1925 quantum theory the ‘anarchist’ position became dominant and modern quantum
physics, in its ‘Copenhagen interpretation’, became one of the main standard bearers of philosophical
obscurantism. In the new theory Bohr’s notorious ‘complementarity principle’ enthroned [weak]
inconsistency as a basic ultimate feature of nature, and merged subjectivist positivism and antilogical
dialectic and even ordinary language philosophy into one unholy alliance. After 1925 Bohr and his
associates introduced a new and unprecedented lowering of critical standards for scientific theories.
This led to a defeat of reason within modern physics and to an anarchist cult of incomprehensible
chaos.

Strong words. It is Becker’s burden, and Becker’s triumph, to show that every word is true.

The story has twists and turns: John von Neumann’s purported mathematical proof (1932) that
quantum mechanics is complete and one could not add anything more to it and retain its
successful predictions; the philosopher Grete Hermann’s detection in 1935 of the fatal flaw in von
Neumann’s proof—and the complete disregard of her work; the elaboration of Einstein’s reasoning
into the famous Einstein-Podolsky-Rosen (EPR) argument; Bohr’s incomprehensible response to
EPR; Schrödinger’s reaction, including his eponymous cat. Surely, one thinks, this mess must have
been cleaned up eventually! But it never was. It persists to this day. And we are only through the
first third of the book.

Robert Oppenheimer is reported to have said, ‘If we cannot disprove Bohm, then we must agree to
ignore him.’

The middle third of Becker’s book adopts a somber tone in the stories of three renegades who
bucked the system in the 1950s and ’60s, after the Copenhagen mysticism had congealed into an
icy command: shut up and calculate! Work on the foundations of quantum theory was effectively
forbidden, with one’s career and future at peril. The first renegade was David Bohm, a bright and
dutiful Copenhagenist until he met the aging Einstein and recanted. Bohm rediscovered the pilot
wave theory that Louis de Broglie had presented at Solvay in 1927. The theory slices through the
enigma—wave or particle?—like Alexander’s sword through the Gordian knot: the answer is wave
and particle. The wavefunction becomes a pilot wave that guides the particles along their paths.
The theory is completely deterministic—no playing dice—and recovers all the predictions of
standard quantum mechanics. One would think Einstein would love the theory, but he did not. The
dreaded nonlocality had not been exorcized. Indeed, it was even more striking.

Bohm’s theory put the lie to von Neumann’s impossibility proof by direct counterexample. Contra
Bohr, the particles are visualizable even at microscopic scale. In short, the theory demonstrates
beyond all doubt that the Copenhagen interpretation is nonsense. But Bohm’s work was ignored
and effectively suppressed.

A political leftist, Bohm had refused to testify at the House Un-American Activities Committee. He
was dismissed from his job at Princeton and went into exile in Brazil. His U.S. passport was
revoked. He eventually found his way to Birkbeck College in London, but never received the
recognition that was his due. In a notorious episode, Robert Oppenheimer is reported to have said,
“If we cannot disprove Bohm, then we must agree to ignore him.”
The second renegade was a graduate student at Princeton not long after Bohm left in 1952. Also
rejecting Copenhagen, Hugh Everett took Schrödinger’s evolving wavefunction and removed the
collapse. He argued that rather than an incomprehensible smear resulting, as Schrödinger’s
neither-alive-nor-dead cat suggested, a multiplication of worlds results. Schrödinger’s cat ends up
both dead and alive, as two cats in two equally real physical worlds. Today this approach is called
the many-worlds interpretation.

Everett’s thesis advisor, John Wheeler, had great enthusiasm for Everett’s innovation. But he
insisted that Everett get the nod of approval from Bohr. Bohr refused, and Wheeler required
Everett to bowdlerize his thesis. Everett left academia and did not look back. His work lay in
obscurity.

The last and greatest renegade was John Stewart Bell. Spurred by Bohm’s papers, Bell queried
whether Einstein’s dreaded spooky action at a distance could be avoided. Copenhagen and the pilot
wave theory had both failed this test. Bell proved that the nonlocality is unavoidable. No local
theory—the type Einstein had sought—could recover the predictions of quantum mechanics. The
predictions of all possible local theories must satisfy the condition called Bell’s inequality.
Quantum theory predicts that Bell’s inequality can be violated. All that was left was to ask nature
herself. In a series of sophisticated experiments, the answer has been established: Bell’s inequality
is violated. The world is not local. No future innovation in physics can make it local again. The
spookiness that Einstein spent decades deriding is here to stay.

How did the physics community react to this epochal discovery? With a shrug of incomprehension.
For decades, discussion of the foundations of quantum theory had been suppressed. Physicists
were unaware of the problems and unaware of the solutions. To this day, they commonly claim that
Bell’s result proves Bohm’s theory to be impossible and indeterminism to be inevitable, while Bell
himself was the staunchest advocate of Bohm’s deterministic theory. Even now, the average
physicist has no understanding of what Einstein argued in the EPR paper and what Bell proved.

The last third of What Is Real? could hopefully be titled “Slow Convalescence.” Gradually the worst
excesses of Bohr’s influence are mitigated as Bell’s work inspires a new generation to look into
foundational issues. We meet a new cast of characters, and the overall atmosphere is mildly
optimistic. But there is a long way to go, and this very book could prove to be a watershed moment
for the physics community if it faces up to its own past and its present. Or, following the fate of
Einstein, Bohm, and Everett, Becker could just be ignored. But if you have any interest in the
implications of quantum theory, or in the suppression of scientific curiosity, What is Real? is
required reading. There is no more reliable, careful, and readable account of the whole history of
quantum theory in all its scandalous detail.

The subtitle of Errol Morris’s new book is, “Or the Man Who Denied Reality.” That might suggest a
biography of Bohr, but the face on the cover is that of Thomas Kuhn. A renowned documentarian
known for his dogged pursuit of truth that got one man off death row, Morris had a short-lived
stint as Kuhn’s graduate student at Princeton. The cut-glass ashtray of the title was hurled at
Morris’s head by Kuhn in a fit of pique. Morris has never forgiven Kuhn. And the ashtray is the
least of it. Morris loathed Kuhn’s relativism and abandonment of reason and evidence, and Kuhn
loathed Morris back.

Morris’s book is a settling of scores, both personal and philosophical. It is also delightful,
digressive, unpredictable, engrossing, amusing, infuriating, and visually stunning.

The tale of The Ashtray is one of serendipity. Kuhn trained at Harvard as a physicist. There he
started teaching classes in the history of science, and as a Harvard Junior Fellow decided to switch
from physics to the history of science. His first book, The Copernican Revolution (1957), is a
splendid work. Rejecting the usual physicist’s tendency to see past scientific work through the lens
of present scientific theory, Kuhn brings the reader back into the debates of the time. There are no
high theoretical pronouncements, just the patient historical work needed to make the assumptions
and commitments of an earlier generation of scientists comprehensible to a modern audience. Had
all of his work been of this character, Kuhn would be remembered as a talented historian of
science, largely unknown by the general public.

Errol Morris’s clash with Thomas Kuhn was preordained: it is one thing to remark how hard truth
can be to establish, and quite another to deny that there is any truth at all.

Through a series of random events, Kuhn was asked to write a monograph on the history of
scientific revolutions for the Encyclopedia of Unified Science. That book became The Structure of
Scientific Revolutions. Kuhn said that The Structure of Scientific Revolutions was just a sketch for
a longer book which never got written. Instead it went on, as it was, to become the most widely
read and influential work of philosophy in the last half of the twentieth century.

The first three quarters of The Structure of Scientific Revolutions give an insightful account of the
everyday life of a scientist doing what Kuhn dubbed normal science. As a doctor of physics, Kuhn
was on familiar ground and his account rang true. Normal science, according to Kuhn, is designed
to solve puzzles. Both the nature of these puzzles and the acceptable means of resolving them are
fixed by a set of rules, practices, and examples that Kuhn called a paradigm. Only by reference to
the paradigm could a scientist defend the importance of the puzzle she is working on and the
legitimacy of her solution. In particular, says Kuhn, it is not in the nature of normal science to
question or challenge the paradigm: the paradigm provides the rules by which the game of a
particular science is played. But of course, we are not playing the same scientific games as we did
two hundred years ago. To get from there to here, various paradigms had to be overthrown and
replaced. In Kuhn’s argot, there had to be paradigm shifts. And all of the excitement and
controversy surrounding Kuhn turns on the nature and the outcome of these paradigm shifts.
Exchanging one paradigm for another constitutes a scientific revolution.

We can ask three critical questions about scientific revolutions: how are they fought, why are they
won (or lost), and what is the cumulative outcome of them. Kuhn’s answers to all of these
questions could be read in an unsettling way.
Kuhn explicitly analogized scientific revolutions to political revolutions. The outcome of an
attempted political revolution cannot be settled through political means since there is no
institutional structure that both sides will submit to. “The parties to a political conflict,” writes
Kuhn, “must finally resort to the techniques of mass persuasion, often including force.” Often
elusive, Kuhn does not explicitly say that scientists engaged in a conflict over paradigms do the
exact same thing, but he does not quite deny it either. (The fate of David Bohm cannot but spring
to mind in this context.) The choice of a paradigm, he says, “can never be unequivocally settled by
logic and experiment alone.” This repudiation of the rationality of scientific practice struck a chord
in the zeitgeist. In the 1960s, it was chic to depict science as no more legitimate or authoritative
than any other cultural practice. Instead, it is all a matter of propaganda and power moves.

But surely, one objects, these scientific revolutions lead to progress. Scientific theories, unlike
fashion trends, do not merely change; they get closer to the truth. Here, too, Kuhn is adamant: he
remarks near the end that the word truth has never once appeared in his text except in a quote by
Francis Bacon. Then comes the coup de grace: truth is just what the winners of the conflict over
paradigms say it is. And of course, according to the winners, their own paradigm is true.

To top it all off, Kuhn insists that the psychological effect of adopting a new paradigm is to change
the very world you live in. Because different paradigms are incommensurable, the people who
adopt them cannot communicate clearly with each other. They do not speak the same language and
their very experience of the world is different. Hence there can be no neutral, objective, rational
adjudication of their dispute.

So Errol Morris’s clash with Kuhn was preordained. After the ashtray incident, Morris did a stint as
a philosophy graduate student at Berkeley, but he ultimately went on to be an investigative
reporter and documentary filmmaker best known for The Thin Blue Line (1988). While shooting a
movie about a prosecution psychiatrist in Texas known as Dr. Death, Morris came across a death
row inmate convicted of a policeman’s murder. Morris became convinced the inmate’s claims of
innocence were true. The Thin Blue Line examines the stories people tell, the explicit and implicit
falsehoods, the distortions that can seal the fate of an innocent man. Although the film depicts
several wildly different accounts of what happened the night of the murder, it is not, Morris insists,
another Rashomon (Akira Kurosawa’s 1951 classic). Morris’s film is fact rather than fiction, and
there is a unique truth about what happened. It occurred exactly one way. It is one thing to remark
how hard truth can be to establish, and quite another to deny that there is any truth at all. Morris
found the latter claim manifestly absurd. Indeed, by getting a confession from the real killer on
tape, Morris solves the murder.

Whereas Becker’s villain is Bohr and his heroes are Einstein and Bell, Morris has Kuhn get his
comeuppance from philosophers Saul Kripke and Hilary Putnam. Morris’s cast of characters reads
like a who’s who of modern analytic philosophy: Bertrand Russell, Karl Popper, Ludwig
Wittgenstein, Norwood Russell Hanson, and John Earman. For the reader familiar with all these
names, there is good sport in seeing them bouncing off each other in Morris’s historical pinball
machine. If a few ring a bell, then with application one can learn some ins and outs of twentieth-
century Anglophone philosophy. If none do, the book may be heavy going. And whereas Becker’s
history is meticulous and his explanations careful and measured, Morris writes more
impressionistically, with passion. His account of the philosophical issues is in the ballpark but not
right on target.

The central philosophical issue that Morris discusses is the reference of terms: how does a noun
such as mass or planet or Albert Einstein pick out or denote something in the world? Without an
account of reference, we cannot construct a theory of truth. A true claim correctly describes the
object or objects it denotes, so determining truth or falsity requires determining the object under
discussion. Analysis of the reference of terms goes back to the very beginning of the strangest and
most intellectually shocking philosophical view in the Western tradition. The pre-Socratic
philosopher Parmenides defended the thesis that all change and motion is an illusion. Parmenides
came to this conclusion by reflecting on claims about nonexistence or, in Greek, tō mē on, that
which is not. We all accept as true the claim that Santa Claus does not exist, or, equivalently, Santa
Claus is nonexistent. But what, exactly, is this supposedly true claim about? It cannot be about
Santa Claus because if it is true, then there is no such thing. Parmenides asserted, “The same
things exist for thinking as for being.” In other words, you can only think about existent items
because there are no nonexistent items to be the objects of thought. It follows that a nonexistence
claim such as “Santa Claus does not exist” cannot be true: if it were true, then Santa Claus would
not refer to anything, so the sentence would be meaningless. Parmenides took this result to
establish the incoherence of all nonexistence claims. And since to say that things have changed is to
say that the nonexistent has come to be, and the nonexistent is meaningless, there can be no
change.

Philosophers rose to Parmenides’s challenge by theorizing how a term such as “unicorn” can be
meaningful even if it does not refer to anything. Unicorn is just shorthand for a description such as
“horse-like animal with a horn growing from its forehead.” And “unicorns do not exist” is true just
in case no animal fits that description. Bertrand Russell suggested a similar analysis of everyday
proper names: “Santa Claus does not exist” just means there is no jolly, bearded, red-suited,
toymaking individual who lives at the North Pole. John Mill accepted the descriptive account of
unicorn but objected to the parallel theory of proper names: a name such as Heisenberg has no
associated description or connotation. It is a mere tag that has only a denotation, the man
Heisenberg himself. There is no description in virtue of which Werner Heisenberg denotes that
very man. So Parmenides’s puzzle still remains for names of nonexistent items such as Santa Claus.

Kuhn believed that we can do no better than miscommunicate, misunderstand, and ultimately
resort to raw institutional power to resolve our disputes.

One advantage of the descriptive view is that it works not only for talk of the actual world, but also
for talk about mere possibilities. The descriptive view explains not just why it is true to say there
are no unicorns, but how under certain conditions there would have been. All you need are
conditions that would have produced horse-like animals with horns. So there are two quite
different contexts in which the meaning and reference of terms has to be explicated: how they get
(or fail to get) referents in the actual world, and how they work when considering merely possible
(counterfactual) situations. The difference between indicative propositions about the actual world
and counterfactual propositions about mere possibilities is illustrated by these two conditionals: if
Lee Harvey Oswald did not shoot John F. Kennedy, then someone else did (indicative and true);
and if Oswald had not shot Kennedy, then someone else would have (counterfactual and probably
false).

Kuhn implicitly accepts the descriptive view. The meanings of theoretical terms such as “mass” are
determined by the theories in which they are deployed. Mass as used by Newton means something
different from mass as employed by Einstein because the theories they are embedded in are
different. Therefore Newtonians cannot really communicate with Einsteinians, Ptolemaic
astronomers cannot really communicate with Copernican astronomers, and so on. This is why, for
Kuhn, scientific revolutions cannot be settled by rational means: the disputants necessarily speak
different languages.

The descriptive view was demolished by Kripke and Putnam in a series of lectures and papers in
the 1970s. Whereas Russell took the descriptive theory and applied it to both general terms like
unicorn and proper names like Heisenberg, Kripke took Mill’s view that names have no
connotation and applied it to general terms like unicorn and water. This left both Kripke and
Putnam with the task of explaining both how scientific terms like mass manage to refer to anything
in the actual world, and how they function when used to talk about merely possible situations.
These two tasks were addressed in different ways: the first by the causal theory of names, and the
second by the theory of rigid designation. Articulating these fine distinctions would be out of synch
with the spirit of Morris’s boisterous book, but as a result, conceptually different issues get
somewhat muddled together.

One page contains a picture of a pet rock, another a painting called Truth Coming from the Well
Armed with Her Whip to Chastise Mankind. Here is a Glyptodon, there a map of bomb damage in
London, and last of all a photograph of a school class that contains a young Adolf Hitler and,
perhaps, a young Ludwig Wittgenstein. For Morris, Wittgenstein so effectively undermined the
philosophical ideals of truth and reason that he seriously pauses to consider which of the two did
more damage to mankind.

The question may seem extreme but it springs from the noble place of a firm commitment to the
possibility of rationality and evidence. Our beliefs should not be whatever feels comforting but
what is most likely to be true. As angry as Morris is about how Kuhn treated him personally, he is
much more outraged at the widespread influence of Kuhn’s ideas. He must delve into philosophy to
elucidate the refutation of Kuhn’s sophistry. For if, as Kuhn suggests, we all live in worlds of our
own manufacture, worlds bent to conform to our beliefs rather than our beliefs being adjusted to
conform to the world, then what becomes of truth? All of us living in this post-truth political
culture must face that question.

Accounts of human gullibility are generally retrospective. We laugh at tulip mania, and shake our
heads at the Salem witch trials. But both Becker and Morris are after more dangerous game,
delusions that are still in effect. One exposes the intellectual rot in the foundations of physics and
the other decries the anti-rationalism sprouting from Kuhn. For Kuhn’s legacy lives on, not in
philosophy (where he is widely derided for his excesses) but in other parts of academia and in
popular culture.

Becker exposes how Bohr and company succeeded, in some cases by smash-mouth academic
politics, including the shameful treatment of Bohm and the denigration of Einstein. But Kuhn
wielded no such power. The Structure of Scientific Revolutions succeeded through its own allure.
What is the attraction of Kuhn’s account of science? It has its roots far back in time, with the
biggest self-deluder of all, Immanuel Kant.

The hand of Kant lies behind both Bohr and Kuhn. In his epic and epically incomprehensible
masterpiece The Critique of Pure Reason (1781), Kant pulled off the grandest intellectual hocus-
pocus in scholarly history. Kant called it his Copernican revolution in philosophy. According to
Copernicus, phenomena that had been attributed to the motion of the stars and other heavenly
bodies—the daily cycle of the sun and stars, the erratic motions of the planets—were really the
product of the motion of Earth itself. These apparent motions had their source not in the observed
but in the observer. Similarly, Kant argued that what have been taken to be features of a mind-
independent reality—the structure of space and time, the existence of cause and effect, the law of
conservation of energy—are actually imposed upon our experience by the mind itself. We have no
justification for thinking that reality is intrinsically spatiotemporal or causally structured. But we
are nonetheless eternally destined to experience the world in those terms because those are the
intellectual and perceptive structures we must bring to our experience.

Our beliefs should not be whatever feels comforting but what is most likely to be true.

Kant’s argumentation for this Parmenidean thesis is famously obscure, and his writing
forbiddingly impenetrable. But the moral he wanted to draw, which goes by the name of
transcendental idealism, is easily summarized. I just did. And for whatever reason, this conclusion
of Kant’s has been attracting people like a siren’s call ever since. Remarkably, many people just
want Kant’s conclusion to be true.

Bohr grew up in an atmosphere of neo-Kantianism. And his most prized achievement, the doctrine
of complementarity, is an insidious tweak on Kant. Kant had argued that in order to be
comprehensible to us—in order to be anschaulich—the world of experience must be given in space
and time and governed by deterministic laws of causation. Fundamental quantities must be
conserved. Bohr adopted these as the essential properties of the classical world. The world of
everyday experience, of lab experiments and their outcomes, must of necessity be classical, said
Bohr.

The microphysical world, according to Bohr, is not visualizable, not classical. It does not, and could
not, satisfy all of Kant’s requirements. But Bohr hit on his great revelation: although the
microscopic world cannot be both pictured in space and time and regarded as governed by
deterministic causal laws, it can be either pictured in space and time or treated by means of
deterministic causal laws.
Furthermore, which of these two possibilities is realized is up to the observer. By setting up one
sort of laboratory situation, the concepts of space and time can be applied to the microsystem, and
by setting up an incompatible laboratory situation the concepts of causation and determinism, of
energy and momentum, can be applied.

The conversion of a classical both/and into a quantum either/or became Bohr’s great mania. He
started to see this complementarity everywhere. In biology, being alive is complementary to having
a detailed account of the structure of cells: “Thus the existence of life itself would have to be
regarded in biology, both as regards the possibilities of observation and of definition, as no more
subject to analysis than the existence of the quantum of action in atomic physics,” Bohr wrote.
There was complementarity between the practical and mystical understanding of human life.
Complementarity would solve the mind-body problem.

Bohr showed as much obsessive attachment to his brainchild as Kant had to his. When granted the
Danish Order of the Elephant in 1947, he chose as the motto on his coat of arms Contraria Sunt
Complementa (opposites are complementary). He even appealed to complementarity to account
for the obscurity of his own writings. According to Rudolf Peierls, Bohr would often say, “truth and
clarity are complementary.” This sentiment is the death of Enlightenment rationality. Descartes,
Locke, Berkeley, Spinoza, Leibniz, and Hume all strove for both clarity of expression and for truth.
But according to Bohr, necessarily the more you have of one, the less you have of the other. Bohr
triumphed through anti-rational aphorisms such as this. As the great physicist Murray Gell-Mann
said, after conversations with Putnam, “Bohr brainwashed a generation of physicists.” A vivid
illustration of Kuhn’s kinship to Bohr in this respect can be drawn from Morris: “What I hated
most about Kuhn’s lectures was the combination of obscurantism and dogmatism. On one hand, he
was extremely dogmatic. On the other, it was never really clear about what.” It is no stretch to
apply this precise description to Bohr, and not much of one to apply it to The Critique of Pure
Reason as well.

When the Copenhagen interpretation got imported to the pragmatic soil of the United States,
Bohr’s incomprehensible nonsense was replaced by the more concise “shut up and calculate.” That
is the philosophy that dominates physics to this day.

What of Kuhn? He was quite explicit about his relationship to Kant. Late in his life, Kuhn declared,
“I am a Kantian with movable categories.” That is, he embraced Kant’s thesis that the mind
imposes structure on the experienced world rather than discovering structure in it, but, contrary to
Kant, the imposed structure can change. Such a change is a paradigm shift, the ultimately
irrational replacement of one experienced reality with another incompatible one. Caught in our
own little thought-worlds, deprived of access to objective truth (because there is no objective
truth), we can do no better than miscommunicate, misunderstand, and ultimately resort to raw
institutional power to resolve our disputes. As appropriated and mangled by Bohr and Kuhn, Kant
—despite his own embrace of science and reason—becomes the agent of the anti-Enlightenment,
the post-truth Age of Spin and Branding we live in.
Both Becker and Morris, each in his own way, is fighting an uphill battle against these trends. Each
wants to reestablish the authority of reason and evidence. But it is the most difficult of all tasks.
How do you convince a whole culture that it is deluded? How do you shine light into conceptual
blind spots? Each of these books, as different as they are in style, is an attempt to provoke an
epiphany and a revolution.

If works like these cannot succeed, then we ought to acknowledge the situation. We should shorten
the dignified designation Homo sapiens to the pithier and more accurate Homo sap.

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