Copenhagen Interpretation - Principles

Principles

Because it consists of the views developed by a number of scientists and philosophers during the second quarter of the 20th Century, there is no definitive statement of the Copenhagen interpretation. Thus, various ideas have been associated with it; Asher Peres remarked that very different, sometimes opposite, views are presented as "the Copenhagen interpretation" by different authors. Nonetheless, there are several basic principles that are generally accepted as being part of the interpretation:

  1. A system is completely described by a wave function, representing the state of the system, which evolves smoothly in time, except when a measurement is made, at which point it instantaneously collapses to an eigenstate of the observable measured.
  2. The description of nature is essentially probabilistic, with the probability of a given outcome of a measurement given by the square of the amplitude of the wave function. (The Born rule, after Max Born)
  3. It is not possible to know the value of all the properties of the system at the same time; those properties that are not known exactly must be described by probabilities. (Heisenberg's uncertainty principle)
  4. Matter exhibits a wave–particle duality. An experiment can show the particle-like properties of matter, or the wave-like properties; in some experiments both of these complementary viewpoints must be invoked to explain the results, according to the complementarity principle of Niels Bohr.
  5. Measuring devices are essentially classical devices, and measure only classical properties such as position and momentum.
  6. The quantum mechanical description of large systems will closely approximate the classical description. (This is the correspondence principle of Bohr and Heisenberg.)

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