Re: Consistency vs. Correspondence

["McIntyre, Mike S." <***>]

John Kineman wrote:

>This was VERY dissatisfying to the physicists who were forced to accept
>it after Einstein, and particularly dissatisfying to Einstein who spent
>the remainder of his life trying to disprove it (the famous "God doesn't
>play dice" quote).

Hi John,

I just wanted to interject a brief comment here.  This level of dis-
satisfaction on the part of ~European~ physicists seems not to have been
shared by ~American~ physicists, i.e. there seems to have been a cul-
tural subtext to this question that affected the reactions of the
physicists.  European physicists, in general, had minds well-stocked
with philosophical ideas dating back, in a relatively unbroken line, to
the ancient Greeks.  In contrast, American physicists had much less
training, or interest, in philosophy -- they thought of themselves as
pragmatists.  The result was that Americans accepted quantum theory
without so much as skipping a beat, and they frankly couldn't understand
why the Europeans were so bugged about it.  Or, at any rate, this is the
argument advanced by Nancy Cartwright in a chapter she wrote for a book
called The Probabilistic Revolution.  Cartwright, as I understand her,
favors the American point of view.  Even though I think my tendencies
lie more with the Europeans, I think her exposition of the differences
between the two points of view is very good.

Best regards,
Mike McIntyre