Quantum mechanics and the puzzle of subjectivity

Quantum mechanics and the puzzle of subjectivity

Steven French 

Despite their huge success, the natural sciences have a problem: they don’t seem to leave much room for the human subject. Edmund Husserl thought this was reason enough to declare science was in ‘crisis’! But an influential, though widely misunderstood, interpretation of quantum mechanics by physicists Fritz London and Edmund Bauer, places the subject at the heart of our most successful mathematical physics theory yet, writes Steven French.

What is notable here, however, is that London also studied phenomenology at university and was considered adept enough for his thesis to be published in the phenomenological ‘yearbook’, where it was noted by Husserl himself. Furthermore, this was no mere youthful intellectual ‘fling’ – London maintained his commitment to phenomenology throughout the 1930s, holding discussions with the philosopher Aron Gurwitsch (who also had a background in physics) while in Paris, for example. This profound phenomenological stance I believe underpins the account that London and Bauer give in their ‘little book’ and undercuts the criticisms of Putnam and Shimony by rejecting the very separation between consciousness and the world that they are based on.

More importantly, the devil, as they say, is in the details of London and Bauer’s manuscript. They begin with what is really quite a startling statement made by two physicists in what has typically been taken to be a textbook presentation of measurement in the quantum context:

‘Without intending to set up a theory of knowledge … physicists were so to speak trapped in spite of themselves into discovering that the formalism of quantum mechanics already implies a well-defined theory of the relationship between the object and the observer, a relation quite different from that implicit in naïve realism, which had seemed, until then, one of the indispensable foundation stones of every science.’

In other words, the subjectivity that Husserl thought had been obscured by the mathematization of science has in fact been recovered in, and set at the very heart of,  that most mathematical of modern theories, quantum mechanics.