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The two figures who dominated the physics of at least the first half of the twentieth century were Albert Einstein and Niels Bohr. Relativity and quantum mechanics will surely remain the major watersheds of this century in our conceptions of the physical world. It also appears reasonably unproblematic that Einstein will continue to be seen not only as the almost sole founder of relativity as a program but also to have set, in theoretical physics, a style of thought that has endured and proven to be extraordinarily fruitful for the developments in modern physics. It is also arguably the case that quantum mechanics is even more profound in its fundamental physical and philosophical implications than is relativity. Bohr is rightly remembered for his seminal 1913 paper on a semiclassical model for the hydrogen atom (and for his quantization rule for the angular momentum) (Bohr, 1913). It is much less clear that his fundamental insights into quantum mechanics will be of lasting value. While the formalism of quantum mechanics has proven to be correct (i.e., predictively accurate), Bohr's "insights' into its interpretation obfuscated many of the fundamental issues. These may actually turn out to have been, eventually, counterproductive for genuine progress on the interpretative problems of quantum mechanics.

DOI: 10.1007/978-94-015-8106-6_3

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