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SCIENCE STUDIES EVENTS
ENGINEERING CRITERIA ON INTERPRETATIONS
OF QUANTUM MECHANICS
Pieter E. Vermaas
Department of Philosophy
Delft University of Technology, The Netherlands
March 2, 2004
Tuesday, 12:30pm
Sumwalt College, Room 102
In this paper, I consider the problem of interpreting quantum mechanics
from a 'meta-interpretational' perspective and then from an engineering
point of view.
I argue firstly that this problem has evolved in part into the problem of
selecting tenable interpretations from a set of available interpretations.
We lack the means to make this selection. There is consensus that
interpretations should be consistent and empirically adequate. But these
criteria are not particularly discriminative. Locality criteria and
conditions on the algebraic structure on descriptions of physical systems
are discriminative but are not generally accepted. Hence, in order to
select the tenable interpretations we should reach consensus on the
existing discriminative criteria, or on new ones.
Secondly I discuss the possibility that the use of quantum mechanics in
engineering may lead to such new criteria. I propose a criterion that
requires that interpretations ascribe the physical properties to technical
artefacts that are entailed by the ascription of technical functions to
those artefacts. And I propose one that requires that interpretations
ascribe the physical properties represented by engineering sketches.
I give some illustrations, and no formulas.
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