No, but the paper argues that Bohr understood his correspondence principle, or at least an aspect of that principle expressed by the notion of rational generalization, as grounded in Hankel’s principle of permanence.

While it is widely agreed that decoherence will not solve the measurement problem, decoherence has been used to explain the “emergence of classicality” and to eliminate the need for a Copenhagen edict that some systems simply have to be treated as classical via a quantum-classical “cut”. I argue that decoherence still relies on such a cut. Decoherence accounts derive classicality only in virtue of their incompleteness, by omission of part of the entangled system of which the classical-appearing subsystem is a (...) part. I argue that this omission is only justified by implicit classical assumptions that objectify a subsystem and are employed via either a traditional Copenhagen cut or a functionally equivalent imposition of separability on a system in a non-separable state. I argue that decoherence cannot derive classicality without assuming it in some other form, and I provide an analysis of when it is appropriate to make these otherwise implicit classical assumptions by adopting a minimalistic Copenhagen-style approach to measurement. Finally, I argue that, ironically, the conditions for making these assumptions may be better satisfied in standard measurement situations than in cases of environmental monitoring. (shrink)

Most interpretations of Quantum Mechanics alternative to Copenhagen interpretation try to avoid the dualistic flavor of the latter. One of the basic goals of the former is to avoid the ad hoc introduction of observers and observations as an inevitable presupposition of physics. Non-Copenhagen interpretations usually trust in decoherence as a necessary mechanism to obtain a well-defined, observer-free transition from a unitary quantum description of the universe to classicality. Even though decoherence does not solve the problem of the definite outcomes, (...) it helps to explain why we do not observe superpositions and, according to Zurek’s existential interpretation, why a specific preferred basis emerges through system–environment interactions. The aim of this paper is to show why such interpretation ends up begging the question and provides little progress in understanding the quantum-to-classical transition; the ultimate reason being that preferred bases always correlate to human observation. Benefitting from the technical discussion, some remarks will be offered in the last section regarding the role of classical observations as a necessary condition to make workable the formalism of Quantum Mechanics and scientific activity itself. (shrink)

The Correspondence Principle of old quantum theory is commonly considered to be the requirement that quantum and classical theories converge in their empirical predictions in the appropriate asymptotic limit. That perception has persisted despite the fact that Bohr and other early proponents of CP clearly did not intend it as a mere requirement, and despite much recent historical work. In this paper, I build on this work by first giving an explicit formulation to the mentioned asymptotic requirement ) and then (...) discussing various possible formulations of CP for emission on the basis of the primary literature as well as general physical and metaphysical considerations. I shall then show that, in all of the most probable interpretations of CP that consider quantum theory as a universal theory, any system incorporating both CR and CP for emission would in fact be inconsistent. Old quantum theory measurably contradicts classical physics in the classical regime. (shrink)

This paper addresses the question of how scientists determine which type of hypothesis is most suitable for tackling a particular problem by examining the historical case of the anomalous β spectrum in early nuclear physics, a puzzle that occasioned the most diverse hypotheses amongst physicists at the time. It is shown that such determinations are most often implicitly informed by scientists' individual perspectives on the structural relations between the various elements of the theory and the problem at hand. In addition (...) to this main result, it is suggested that Wolfgang Pauli's neutrino idea may well have been an adaptation of Ernst Rutherford's original and older neutron idea, which would provide evidence that the adaptation of older ideas is a more common practice than is often thought. (shrink)