Bulletin of the American Physical Society
2005 APS April Meeting
Saturday–Tuesday, April 16–19, 2005; Tampa, FL
Session C5: Quantum Optics Through the Lens of History |
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Sponsoring Units: FHP Chair: Daniel Greenberger, City College of CUNY Room: Marriott Tampa Waterside Grand Salon G/H |
Saturday, April 16, 2005 1:30PM - 2:06PM |
C5.00001: Quantum Optics from the Beginning - Reflections from Rochester Invited Speaker: |
Saturday, April 16, 2005 2:06PM - 2:42PM |
C5.00002: From Bohm to Aspect: Philosophy Enters the Optics Laboratory Invited Speaker: My talk deals with the shifting boundary between philosophy and science from the 1950s to the 1980s, as it relates to the foundations of quantum mechanics. The poor reception of Bohm's causal interpretation of quantum mechanics was related to the idea that it was merely a philosophical inquiry. The controversy it stirred up, however, produced, as a byproduct, the reanalysis of John von Neumann's proof, and 10 years later, this led John Stewart Bell to his theorem. In telling this story, I examine the professional circumstances, backgrounds, and profiles of three physicists, Abner Shimony, John F. Clauser, and Alain Aspect, who were associated with the path from Bell's theoretical work to the experimental tests of the Bell inequalities. I argue that: (1) What was considered good physics after Aspect's 1982 experiments was once considered by many a philosophical matter instead of a scientific one. (2) The path from philosophy to physics was a slow and sinuous one and involved a change in the physics community's attitude about the status of the foundations of quantum mechanics. (3) Foundations of quantum mechanics entered the optics laboratory, but did not lose its philosophical implications. [Preview Abstract] |
Saturday, April 16, 2005 2:42PM - 3:18PM |
C5.00003: Leonard Mandel and Experimental Tests of Quantum Mechanics Invited Speaker: Everybody knows the ``mind-boggling'' experiment that Leonard Mandel published in 1991, with Xingyu Zou and Lijun Wang, which showed that it was not the making of an observation that determined which of two complementary properties would manifest itself, but rather the setting up of an experiment that would permit such an observation to be made. I argue that the roots of this experiment go back to Mandel's work in the 1960s. Further, he proposed the actual experiment first in the context of the debate over the adequacy of semiclassical theory, then in the context of de Broglie's interpretation of quantum mechanics, and finally in the context of down conversion. I speculate that his habit of examining and re-examining each idea in changing contexts was one source of Mandel's creativity and profound insight into physics. [Preview Abstract] |
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