bluuebunny/crossref_metadata_2025 huggingface dataset:
Twentieth-Century Women Writers and the Feminist Novel
Authors: Olivera-Williams María Rosa
Published: May 2022

The twentieth century was the century of women, feminism, and the feminist novel in Latin America. The history of Latin American feminism presents three milestones: first, the women’s movements that demanded political and civil equality at the beginning of the century and culminated in the 1950s with what Julieta Kirkwood called “the years of silence”; second, the violent decades of the 1970s and 1980s, when women challenged their historic exclusion from political life, showed how authoritarian regimes replicated patriarchal oppression, and developed feminist theories and practices; and third, the 1990s, when women focused on the damaging effects of neoliberalism, which impacted the activism of women and the development of feminist ideas. This chapter focuses on the feminist novel since the 1950s, when women ventured into a genre they had barely published in the past, and traces its course through the multiple positions that Latin American feminism took during the twentieth century.
Magical Realism and the Marvelous Real in the Novel
Authors: Chanady Amaryll
Published: May 2022

The Latin American novel has often been associated with these two literary modes, at least since the Boom of the 1960s. This chapter defines and discusses both terms, highlighting parallels and distinctions, and briefly analyzes a few key novels, including narratives from the so-called post-Boom period. It also assesses the importance of the modes for Latin American fiction, discusses some of the controversies surrounding them, and examines them in the context of Latin American history and culture. Literature associated with magical realism and the marvelous real is extremely diverse, and this chapter emphasizes the important differences between individual narratives and between the position of their authors. Special attention is given to the connections between these modes and ethnographic fiction, primitivism, hybridity, cultural heterogeneity, transculturation, postcolonial theory, postmodernism, and discourses of identity. Finally, instead of relegating the modes to the dustbin of exoticism in which Latin America presents itself as a fascinating non-Western other, aided by a successful editorial strategy in an increasingly global consumer market, the chapter rethinks their significance in the light of more recent concepts such as the pluriverse and the ecology of others.
Mapping Juan Rulfo
Authors: Bencomo Anadeli
Published: May 2022

Rulfo’s Pedro Páramo has been characterized as a masterpiece of Latin American fiction. Published in the mid-1950s, it was praised for its reinvention of the regionalist novel. This chapter traces a succinct map of different approaches by literary critics to Rulfo’s novel. Although much attention has been given to the extreme economy of its prose, to the fragmented structure of the novel, and to the acoustic quality of its writing, nothing has been said about the fragments depicting natural elements in a performative way. This chapter argues that Pedro Páramo incorporates nature as an active agent through an alternate narrative imagination that not only listens to the voices of dead villagers in Comala, but also upsets the conventional representation of nature as a passive background. The discussion of Pedro Páramo’s mapping of the margins of modernization in Mexico is similarly relevant to this analysis of the novel.
The Star of the Hour
Authors: Williams Claire
Published: May 2022

One hundred years since her birth, Brazilian writer Clarice Lispector is fêted around the world for her passionate, enigmatic, idiosyncratic prose, which challenges conventions of genre, form and content, word, and sentence. This chapter begins by making reference to the ways Lispector’s centenary was commemorated in 2020 and moves on to outline her life and career. It describes the narrative strategies that make her work simultaneously strange and compelling. The second half of the chapter presents some of her literary afterlives: homages to her literary originality, her beauty and aloofness, and the intimacy and bravery she inspires in her readers.
The Postmodern Novel and the Post-Boom in Latin America
Authors: Medrano José Manuel , Williams Raymond L.
Published: May 2022

The modern, postmodern, and post-Boom roots are found in various avant-garde Latin American fiction manifestations in the 1920s and 1930s. More specifically, scholars have pointed to the Semana de Arte Moderna in Brazil, as well as the fiction of Gilberto Owen and Jaime Torres Bodet in Mexico and Vicente Huidobro in Chile, in addition to a host of others who were the forerunners to the modern and postmodern novel in Latin America, which was produced from 1945 to 2015. The key connectors between the vanguardias and the rise of the modern novel were Jorge Luis Borges’s short story collection Ficciones (1944) and Miguel Ángel Asturias’s novel El señor presidente (The President, 1946). The Latin American postmodern novel follows common patterns associated with the 1970s and 1980s North Atlantic postmodernism: disruption, discontinuity, decentering, dislocation, indeterminacy, and antilocalization. On the other hand, the novel of the post-Boom was a reaction precisely against the modern novel in Latin American associated with the 1960s Boom. Unlike the Boom writers in the late 1960s and the postmodern writers of the 1970s and 1980s, post-Boom writers rejected these novelists’ hyper-experimentation. After briefly reviewing the avant-gardes, as well as the terms “modern,” “postmodern,” and “post-Boom,” this essay covers Latin American fiction from Asturias and Agustín Yáñez in the 1940s, to Roberto Bolaño, to Cristina Rivera Garza, and Isabel Allende in the twentieth century, as well as their respective contemporaries.
The Governance of Superdiversity
Authors: Scholten Peter
Published: May 2022

This chapter brings a complexity perspective to the governance of superdiversity. Superdiversity as a specific form of social complexity challenges traditional views on policymaking in the area of migration and migration-related diversities. Ideas about societal steering, the role of central government, rationality, and controllability often don’t reflect the reality of complexity, where the role of government is often limited, and societal processes are unpredictable and characterized by high uncertainty. However, belief in societal steering and in central government has remained firm in this policy area. A complexity governance perspective helps clarify that coping with complexity requires a different perspective on policies, policymaking, and the role of central government. From a complexity perspective, the chapter argues that failing to come to terms with complexity is one of the reasons policies in this area so often seem to derail, as witnessed in the “refugee crisis,” the “multicultural crisis,” and the many other crises that this policy area has gone through. A complexity governance perspective helps explain how policy processes can come to terms with complexity by a structural process of mainstreaming migration and diversities in society and in institutions. From this perspective, migration and migration-related diversity are not approached as stand-alone topics that can be engineered or “fixed” from a state-centric perspective, but as complex topics that cut across generic policy sectors and institutions and that require a structural and responsive approach to often unpredictable, uncertain situations with a broad actor network.
Transnationalism, Elite Migrants, and the Spatiality of Superdiversity
Authors: Yamamura Sakura
Published: May 2022

The geography or the spatiality of superdiversity has been only implicitly researched, primarily in ethnographic and sociolinguistic empirical studies on superdiversity. This chapter proposes a geographical conceptualization of superdiversity by analyzing sociospatial superdiversification as a process of bringing together the interconnected phenomena of the global increase of migration and the local transformation of urban spaces. By connecting the spatiality of superdiversity to the debates on the nexus of transnational migration and cities, particularly global cities, the chapter brings a broader contextualization of the diversification processes occurring in different cities on the globe. The approach of such multiscalar embeddedness of the city making and shaping processes demonstrates how the local urban transformation is connected to the global phenomenon of societal superdiversity. It calls for further analysis of the contexts of superdiversity at different scales and research on the diversifications occurring in different socioeconomic classes of transnational migration in urban contexts.
Migration, Superdiversity, and Encounters of the Intimate Kind in Home-Spaces
Authors: Yeoh Brenda S. A.
Published: May 2022

This chapter extends existing spatial and scalar conceptualizations of superdiversity by examining the politics of encounter in the microlevel spaces of the home. Anchored in the growing body of literature on the “geographies of encounter” and drawing predominantly from Asian experiences of care and intimacy in the context of live-in migrant domestic workers and marriage migrants, the chapter re-presents the home-space as a site—and one that is sustained by—of multiple axes of power and difference that operate along the lines of gender, race/ethnicity, class, and nationality, contradicting the dominant notions of home as private, familiar, and familial. The chapter also shows how home-space operates as a site of struggle, reflecting the uneasy balance between hierarchical and affinal relationships across both economic and affective terrains. By turning the analytical spotlight on the home, the chapter shows how the politics of superdiversity permeates urban space through the microspaces of intimacy and familiarity.
Homemaking in Superdiverse Public Space
Authors: Boccagni Paolo
Published: May 2022

This chapter invites a systematic exploration of the interplay between superdiversity and homemaking in the public urban space. The notion of home, as a form of special place attachment, also involves the public sphere and lies at the root of contrasting ways of perceiving, claiming, and using public sphere. Drawing on a literature review and original research on home and migration, this chapter discusses the factors whereby different social actors and groups have unequal rights and opportunities to make themselves at home in public regions, such as streets, parks, amenity infrastructures, or entire cities. In the lived experience of the public space, different social actors and groups claim or at least perceive certain portions of it as their home, where they hold a higher or even exclusive right to stay, be in control, and belong. Such processes tend to go unnoticed as long as they involve the ethnic and long-resident mainstream, but they become more visible and contentious when there is no self-evident majority group—no group that, by habituation if not by legal entitlement, is in a stronger position to call a certain place home. Overall, a critical emphasis on home(making) in the public scales “up” the metaphor of home to capture competing views of superdiverse public spaces and of the appropriate ways to use them. This raises substantive issues on the access, use, recognition, and even ownership of the public.
Superdiversity, Systems Psychodynamics, and Migrant Business
Authors: Trehan Kiran
Published: May 2022

This chapter investigates the ways in which systems psychodynamic theory and practice can contribute to our understanding of how ethnic minority enterprises operate in superdiverse urban settings. Systems psychodynamics is an approach that explores the interaction between collective structures, norms, and practices in social systems and the perception, motivations, and emotions of minority entrepreneurs within those systems. The chapter argues that the systems psychodynamic literature can be combined with perspectives on superdiversity to extend our thinking about the psychodynamics of migrant business. Focusing on systems psychodynamics provides an opportunity to highlight the contextually specific ways in which unconscious dynamics, emotional responses, and social power relations within the migrant business combine to promote and to prevent enterprise. This can be seen as a way of promoting employment and local development, while also kick-starting broader business regeneration. The chapter reviews the key ideas and controversies of minority entrepreneurship. It illuminates how systems psychodynamic theory can enrich our understanding of the ways in which ethnic minority enterprises interconnect in encounters whose participants have different biographies, trajectories, and linguistic histories. The chapter concludes by demonstrating how a synthesis of systems psychodynamics and diversity sheds new light on the complex and nuanced experience of ethnic minority enterprises and the work territory they are creating for themselves. Exploring migrant enterprise as an organizational system creates a distinctive new perspective for systems psychodynamic and superdiversity perspectives and helps us to identify and articulate new implications for small firms’ research and practice.
Superdiversity and Urban Planning
Authors: Pemberton Simon
Published: May 2022

Previous research exploring the relationship between diversity and urban planning has overwhelmingly focused on the multicultural city. In contrast, there has been much less focus to date on the challenges of increasing superdiversity for urban planning. The chapter initially highlights how superdiversity is leading to changes in the spatial distribution of migrants in the city and away from traditional thinking that there are just one or two large-scale concentrations of ethnic groups in urban areas. In fact, individuals with varying characteristics can be spread across the city, and more people from diverse backgrounds are living in the same areas than ever before as a consequence of all sorts of unpredictable migration flows. Such complexity presents increasing challenges for urban planners. The chapter evaluates key areas of research, focusing on the relationship between urban planning and issues of diversity. In turn, it sets out a number of themes that warrant further attention with respect to urban planning responses to increasing superdiversity, which extend beyond existing analyses. This includes a focus on the importance of settlement structures, strategies of spatial distribution for new migrant arrivals and social mixing, and the need to coproduce new urban planning strategies with local residents.
ACT for the Treatment of Psychosis and Schizophrenia-Spectrum Disorders
Authors: Gaudiano Brandon A. , Ellenberg Stacy
Published: May 2022

Acceptance and commitment therapy for psychosis (ACTp) is supported by a number of randomized controlled trials documenting that the treatment is safe and efficacious for patients with psychosis and a range of schizophrenia-spectrum disorders. These initial clinical trials show that ACTp produces improvements in psychotic symptoms, depression, functioning, and quality of life in both inpatient and outpatient samples, and has been delivered in group and individual formats. In particular, several studies have documented the ability of ACTp to reduce rehospitalization rates at follow-up. Initial work also supports ACT-consistent processes of change in terms of the treatment’s potential mechanisms of action. Future research is needed to further specify mediators and moderators of effects, and to confirm the effects of ACTp in larger samples when implemented in real-world practice settings.
Psychological Flexibility
Authors: Ong Clarissa W. , Eustis Elizabeth H.
Published: May 2022

Psychological flexibility is the ability to nonjudgmentally observe and be open to inner experiences in the present moment, while engaging in behaviors consistent with freely chosen values. A construct related to psychological flexibility is psychological inflexibility, which describes rigid responding to inner experiences, resulting in impulsivity or avoidance that interferes with meaningful action. Psychological inflexibility is posited as the key source of suffering in the acceptance and commitment therapy (ACT) model, and the central aim of ACT is to improve psychological flexibility. However, targeting psychological flexibility is complicated for several reasons: (1) it is difficult to measure with standardized instruments, (2) clinicians need to discern the idiographic function of behaviors to assess psychological flexibility, (3) clinicians themselves need to be able to practice and model psychological flexibility, and (4) cross-cultural research on the measurement of psychological flexibility is lacking. This article discusses these challenges and provides suggestions for future directions.
Transnational Digital Governance and Its Impact on Artificial Intelligence
Authors: Dempsey Mark , McBride Keegan , Haataja Meeri , Bryson Joanna J.
Published: May 2022

The rapid pace of technological advancement and innovation has put existing governance and regulatory mechanisms to the test. There is a clear need for new and innovative regulatory mechanisms that enable governments to successfully manage the integration of digital technologies into our societies, and to ensure that such integration occurs in a sustainable, beneficial, and just manner. Artificial Intelligence (AI) stands out as one of the most debated of such innovations. What exactly is it, how should it be built and deployed, how can it be used, and how should it be regulated? Yet across the period of this debate, AI is becoming widely used and addressed within existing, evolving, and bespoke regulatory contexts. The present chapter explores the extant governance of AI and, in particular, what is arguably the most successful AI regulatory approach to date, that of the European Union. The chapter explores core definitional concepts, shared understandings, values, and approaches currently in play. It argues that not only are the Union’s regulations locally effective, but, due to the so-called “Brussels effect,” regulatory initiatives within the European Union also have a much broader global impact. As such, they warrant close consideration.
Dueling Perspectives in AI and U.S.–China Relations
Authors: Ding Jeffrey
Published: May 2022

It is generally recognized that the United States and China are the two leading states in AI development. In recent years, U.S.–China competition in AI has escalated, reflecting a bilateral relationship that has turned increasingly contentious. Unsurprisingly, analysis about the potential effects of AI on U.S.–China relations is strongly rooted in technonationalism, which emphasizes interstate competition over technological assets. By decentering the nation-state as the key unit of analysis for technological change, this chapter presents an alternative framework for comprehending the implications of AI for U.S.–China relations. It first articulates how transnational networks of both firms and individuals complicate the calculation of the U.S. and China’s “national interests” in AI. It then probes how AI advances, such as those in machine translation, could bind the two countries even closer together. Taking technoglobalism seriously is essential to rebalancing discussions about how AI could transform U.S.–China relations.
AI, Complexity, and Regulation
Authors: Weissinger Laurin B.
Published: May 2022

Regulating and governing AI will remain a challenge due to the inherent intricacy of how AI is deployed and used in practice. Regulation effectiveness and efficiency are inversely proportional to system complexity and the clarity of objectives: the more complicated an area is and the harder objectives are to operationalize, the more difficult it is to regulate and govern. Safety regulations, while often concerned with complex systems like airplanes, benefit from measurable, clear objectives and uniform subsystems. AI has emergent properties and is not just “a technology.” It is interwoven with organizations, people, and the wider social context. Furthermore, objectives like “fairness” are not only difficult to grasp and classify, but they will change their meaning case-by-case. The inherent complexity of AI systems will continue to complicate regulation and governance; however, with appropriate investment, monetary and otherwise, complexity can be tackled successfully. Due to the considerable power imbalance between users of AI in comparison to those AI systems are used on, successful regulation might be difficult to create and enforce. As such, AI regulation is more of a political and socio-economic problem than a technical one.
Navigating Shifting Sands
Authors: Black Wendy , Gibbon Victoria E. , Omar Rooksana
Published: May 2022

In the decades that followed South Africa’s transition from apartheid to democratic rule, museums and universities adopted a major ethical shift toward rehumanizing and returning illicitly obtained ancestral human skeletal remains to local communities. Although much work on repatriation, reburial, and restitution processes has been conducted since, it has been without adequate government legislative and procedural grounding and support, often resulting in circular discussions and limited or disappointing outcomes. In the midst of growing activism related to the repatriation of objects and ancestral remains from Africa held in institutions globally, these efforts have become a societal and national priority and many museum and university collections and repositories are calling for action. The implementation of defined national processes coupled with sound guiding principles, as well as adequate community and stakeholder engagement for any repatriation and restitution event can mitigate potential breakdowns and lead to successful and amiable results. The authors of this chapter provide a set of guiding principles for restitution processes based on their experience in the hope that this initiates discussion so that these can be transferred to similar political and social contexts globally.
The Role of the Microbiota-Gut-Brain Axis in Neurodevelopment and Mental Health in Childhood and Adolescence
Authors: Champagne-Jorgensen Kevin , McVey Neufeld Karen-Anne
Published: May 2022

Evidence for the importance of the intestinal microbiota in the development and function of the central nervous system is growing apace. Most of the work in this area has been conducted in translational rodent models but clinical studies are increasing. Studies examining the role of intestinal bacteria in brain health and disease are of high interest but most focus on the extremes of age. There is a need for more work investigating the microbiota-gut-brain axis during the childhood and adolescent windows of critical brain development. Here we outline current thinking regarding general patterns of brain development and intestinal microbial change during early childhood and adolescence and emphasize that dynamic shifts in intestinal colonization occur concurrently with the journey to neurodevelopmental milestones. We review the body of evidence that supports the hypothesis that bugs can alter neural function, with specific focus on what is known regarding bacterial input on brain development in youth.
Ethical and Legal Issues in Transcranial Stimulation for Cognitive Enhancement
Authors: Jwa Anita S.
Published: May 2022

Transcranial stimulation has recently been gaining momentum as a promising tool for cognitive enhancement. Like other emerging biomedical technologies, however, the promises of transcranial stimulation as cognitive enhancement come with critical ethical and legal challenges. To ensure the safe and responsible use of this technology, we should complement technological development with rigorous ethical and regulatory analysis. This chapter aims to provide a general overview of ethical and legal challenges, lighting a path to maximize the benefits of transcranial stimulation as cognitive enhancement while minimizing the perils of this technology. Focusing on transcranial stimulation, it first introduces some of the major ethical concerns surrounding cognitive enhancement and then reviews previous discussions on the regulation of both cognitive enhancement devices and their uses in real-world settings. Given the impending widespread use of transcranial stimulation by the public, this chapter concludes by emphasizing the need for developing a sound policy for the use of transcranial stimulation as cognitive enhancement.
Introduction
Authors: Freire Olival , Bacciagaluppi Guido , Darrigol Olivier , Hartz Thiago , Joas Christian , Kojevnikov Alexei , Pessoa Osvaldo
Published: May 2022

Quantum mechanics presents an impressive record. It became the backbone of most research in physics, led to applications such as the transistor and laser, and prompted an upheaval in the philosophy of science. This century of conquests has also been a time of ongoing debates about the foundations and interpretation of the theory, which has been referred to as the quantum controversy. This Handbook is a survey on these debates. Some of the so-called “interpretations” are not interpretations of a fixed formalism, they are different theories, thus it has been a debate about the interpretations and the foundations of quantum mechanics. In this volume, the term “history of interpretations” is used for the sake of brevity. The successive parts of the Handbook deal with the scientific and philosophical issues under debate, historical landmarks, places and contexts, historical and philosophical theses, and the proliferation of interpretations.
A Perennially Grinning Cheshire Cat? Over a Century of Experiments on Light Quanta and Their Perplexing Interpretations
Authors: Hentschel Klaus
Published: May 2022

This chapter contextualizes and compares different interpretations of Einstein’s concept of light quanta. Einstein’s “heuristic point of view” was attacked from all sides, including many of Einstein’s mentors since it violated basic assumptions of classical electrodynamics. The interpretation of light quanta slowly started to change after Robert Millikan confirmed proportionality of the limiting potential to the maximum energy of electrons released in the photoelectric effect. In 1922, Arthur Compton confirmed that light was scattered by electrons exactly like high-relativistic pointlike particles would do. The many synonyms that physicists used to denote this concept of ‘light quanta’ or ‘photons’ -- the usual term in English since 1926, indicate different mental models: Are they simply finite, ‘quantized packages of energy’ or ‘bullets of light’? ‘Atoms of light’ or ‘molecules of light’? ‘Light corpuscles’ or ‘quantized waves’? Singularities of the field or spatially extended structures able to interfere? ‘Photons’ in G.N. Lewis’s quasi-atomistic sense, or virtual exchange particles transmitting electromagnetic force according to quantum electrodynamics?
The Evolving Understanding of Quantum Statistics
Authors: Monaldi Daniela
Published: May 2022

The change that quantum statistics produced in the concept of microphysical entities was not the result of an experimental discovery, a logical inference, nor a choice between preformed conceptual models. It was, rather, the result of uncoordinated efforts to reach a physical understanding of the evolving mathematical-theoretical apparatus by modifying and rearranging familiar ideas about particles. This chapter examines the history of early interpretations of quantum statistics, from Einstein’s first deciphering of Bose’s formal procedure to the earliest attempts to make sense of the formalism that unified Bose-Einstein and Fermi-Dirac statistics with the quantum mechanics of multi-particle systems. The fragmentary and discordant views of this early period highlight the interpretive flexibility of the formal apparatus. The first extended articulations of a new, unified conception of particles emerged only after WWII, as signalled by Dirac’s 1945 proposal of the two new foundational categories of “bosons” and “fermions”.
The Measurement Problem
Authors: Pessoa Osvaldo
Published: May 2022

This chapter reviews the history of the measurement problem in quantum mechanics, from its roots in the wave-particle paradox until around 1990. After examining von Neumann’s formulation of the problem, the proposed solutions are examined, separated into objectivist solutions, subjectivist views, the many worlds interpretation, and views that consider the measurement problem to be a pseudoproblem. The debate blossomed in the 1960s, with new versions of von Neumann’s insolubility proofs, the consideration of null-result measurements, and the proposal of non-linear corrections to the Schrödinger equation. In the 1970s and 1980s, new objectivist ideas were put forward, such as the notion that all systems are open, and the theory of stochastic localizations, which merged with the non-linear approach. Many solutions also assumed that the apparatus should be described with infinite degrees of freedom. Experiments have extended the known limits of quantum superpositions, addressing the question of whether macroscopic superpositions are possible.
Einstein’s Criticism of Quantum Mechanics
Authors: Paty Michel
Published: May 2022

After having played a fundamental pioneer role in the birth of quantum physics by unveiling non classical properties and formulating a first coherent theoretical approach, Einstein was far less enthusiastic about the constitution of quantum mechanics as proclaimed in 1927. From then on he constantly argued against the pretention of its founders and proponents to have settled a definitive and complete physical theory for the quantum domain. His arguments are analysed, situated in the context of the dominant “complementarity interpretation” and following their evolution with time. They are centered on an “uncompleteness” of the quantum theory with respect to reality and objectivity, exigencies which were at the core of his own program since the start. In the light of further advances in quantum physics, it is then shown how Einstein’s objections have played a decisive role in the clarification of specific quantum concepts such as local non-separability (entanglement and non-locality), while maintaining that of an individual quantum physical system. Through these, it has been possible to deepen the understanding and applications of quantum correlations and the connection between the quantum and classical descriptions (decoherence with consequences as to the “measurement problem”).
Tackling Loopholes in Experimental Tests of Bell’s Inequality
Authors: Kaiser David I.
Published: May 2022

Bell’s inequality sets a strict threshold for how strongly correlated the outcomes of measurements on two or more particles can be, if the outcomes of each measurement are independent of actions undertaken at arbitrarily distant locations. Quantum mechanics, on the other hand, predicts that measurements on particles in entangled states can be more strongly correlated than Bell’s inequality would allow. Whereas experimental tests conducted over the past half-century have consistently measured violations of Bell’s inequality---consistent with the predictions of quantum mechanics---the experiments have been subject to one or more “loopholes,” by means of which certain alternatives to quantum theory could remain consistent with experimental results. This chapter reviews three of the most significant loopholes, often dubbed the “locality,” “fair-sampling,” and “freedom-of-choice” loopholes, and describes how recent experiments have addressed them.
The Measuring Process in Quantum Field Theory
Authors: Hartz Thiago
Published: May 2022

This chapter discusses the interpretation of quantum field theory from a historical perspective. It pays special attention to the measuring process in quantum electrodynamics, and indicates how this process is related to quantum field uncertainties, to the vacuum energy, and to the divergent calculations. Those aspects reflect, in a broader sense, a plurality of perspectives concerning the proper description of quantum phenomena, to the role of mathematics in quantum theory, and to the predictive power of physical theories. The chapter also presents some episodes from the history of quantum field theory from the 1920s to the 1960s, with an emphasis on the renormalization program of the late 1940s. Finally, it discusses how pragmatism and mathematics shaped the physicists’ views on quantum field theory.
The Interpretation Debate and Quantum Gravity
Authors: Blum Alexander S. , Lessel Bernadette
Published: May 2022

We discuss the relation between of the debate on the interpretation of quantum mechanics and the search for a quantum theory of gravity, from its beginnings in the 1950s and 60s (Léon Rosenfeld’s rejection of the quantum gravity program, John Wheeler’s temporary endorsement of the Everett interpretation for cosmological reasons) to the surge of interest in this connection that began in the mid-1980s, resulting from a series of Oxford Symposia on Quantum Gravity.
Natural Reconstructions of Quantum Mechanics
Authors: Darrigol Olivier
Published: May 2022

In its most common formulations, quantum mechanics begins with shockingly counterintuitive concepts and highly abstract mathematical objects such as operators in Hilbert space. Since the early years of quantum mechanics, there have been several attempts to reconstruct it from more natural assumptions. The purpose of this chapter is to describe three outstanding examples of such reconstructions. The first is based on continuous deformation of the classical algebra of infinitesimal evolutions (Jacques Vey, André Lichnerowicz, and Simone Gutt); the second on the basic logic of Yes-No experimental questions (John von Neumann and Constantin Piron); the third on natural axioms for the probabilities of measurement outcomes (Lucien Hardy), partly justified by correspondence arguments. These reconstructions may help to understand the contents of the theory, they may prepare future generalizations, or they may shed new light on quantum paradoxes and interpretation problems. Regarding this last point, it will for instance be shown that one of the oddest consequences of quantum mechanics, the EPR correlations, can be derived from very simple and natural assumptions on spin measurements.
The Axiomatization of Quantum Theory Through Functional Analysis
Authors: Landsman Klaas
Published: May 2022

Quantum theory and functional analysis were created and put into essentially their final form during similar periods ending around 1930. Each was also a key outcome of the major revolutions that both physics and mathematics as a whole underwent at the time. This paper studies their interaction in this light, emphasizing the leading roles played by Hilbert in preparing the ground and by von Neumann in bringing them together during the crucial year of 1927, when he gave the modern, abstract definition of a Hilbert space and applied this concept to quantum mechanics (consolidated in his famous monograph from 1932). Subsequently, I give a very brief overview of three areas of functional analysis that have had fruitful interactions with quantum theory since 1932, namely unbounded operators, operator algebras, and distributions. The paper closes with some musings about the role of functional analysis in actual physics.
Quantum Mechanics is Routinely Used in Laboratories with Great Success, but No Consensus on its Interpretation has Emerged
Authors: Laloë Franck
Published: May 2022

In their laboratories, physicists constantly use the theory of quantum mechanics, as a remarkable tool to make accurate predictions concerning their observations, and to discover new effects. But, strangely enough, and almost one century after the introduction of this theory, no consensus on its interpretation has emerged. The present contribution describes this unusual situation and discusses the main families of interpretations that have been proposed in the literature.
The Copenhagen Interpretation
Authors: Howard Don
Published: May 2022

The term, “Copenhagen Interpretation,” is used to designate a set of ideas associated with leading thinkers clustered around Niels Bohr and the Bohr Institute in Copenhagen. Foremost among those ideas are (1) complementarity, (2) a necessary role for classical modes of description, (3) the completeness of quantum mechanics, (4) objective indeterminacy, (5) wave-particle duality, (6) measurement-induced, wave-packet collapse, (7) a disturbance analysis of indeterminacy, and (8) a privileged role for the subjective observer in the quantum realm. Widely assumed to represent the position of Bohr, himself, a number of these ideas were to be found more commonly in the writings of Werner Heisenberg, and members of the Copenhagen community were sometimes badly divided over their status and validity. This article surveys the historical development of these ideas and their eventual coalescence as key ingredients of the Copenhagen interpretation, with an emphasis on the physical considerations that drove that development.
Copenhagen and Niels Bohr
Authors: Jacobsen Anja Skaar
Published: May 2022

This chapter addresses the question of how the Danish capital Copenhagen became the embodiment of the philosophical implications of quantum physics, and it discusses some of Niels Bohr’s main ideas in this Copenhagen Interpretation, including complementarity. The chapter suggests that the combination of a favourable Danish science policy with Bohr’s eminent skills as fundraiser and in scientific leadership, paved the way for the small hitherto scientifically peripheral Kingdom of Denmark to be able to foster one of Europe’s leading scientific centers in the interwar years, viz. the Institute for Theoretical Physics. With respect to the interpretation of quantum mechanics the chapter emphasises that Bohr saw quantum physics as an epistemological rather than an ontological theory. Bohr’s focus on the role of measurement in quantum physics is outlined, and how this was discussed and elucidated in Copenhagen through idealised thought experiments. The chapter concludes with a brief review of how the physicists in Copenhagen responded to the new critique and development of the interpretation of quantum physics after the Second World War.
Grete Hermann’s Interpretation of Quantum Mechanics
Authors: Crull Elise
Published: May 2022

In 1933, the young polymath Grete Hermann composed a manuscript on determinism in quantum mechanics which she sent to Dirac and to Copenhagen, where it was read with interest by Bohr, Heisenberg, and Weizsäcker. Based on the promise shown in this essay, Hermann was invited to join Heisenberg in Leipzig; this visit culminated in the publication of a substantial essay in March 1935 on the natural-philosophical foundations of quantum mechanics. Hermann’s 1935 essay is one of the first, and certainly among the finest, philosophical treatments of quantum mechanics. Although her aim was to demonstrate the causal completeness of this theory, she far exceeds this goal by providing the contours of a novel neo-Kantian interpretation of quantum mechanics. Due to Hermann’s rigorous dual training in mathematics and philosophy, this interpretation does particular justice to the intricacies of the theory and offers a view unlike others forming the canon of early interpretations.
Early Solvay Councils
Authors: Perillán José G.
Published: May 2022

For over one-hundred years, Solvay Councils have brought to Brussels some of the world’s most prominent scientists to interrogate seemingly intractable problems. These elite conferences have often been portrayed as battlegrounds for scientific immortality and furnaces of rational discourse that forged scientific consensus on quantum theory. Although the conference proceedings certainly give us a record of formative scientific debates, a contextualized historical analysis allows us to understand the power of social and rhetorical forces on the outcomes of these Solvay gatherings. In particular, the Solvay Councils of 1927 and 1930 were reflections of, and catalysts for, a broader ongoing social process that overcame deep political divides and a divergence of approaches to quantum theory. The result was a forced convergence around a tentative quantum consensus that was instrumental in silencing interpretation debates for decades to come.
The Foundations of Quantum Mechanics in Post-War Italy’s Cultural Context
Authors: Santo Flavio Del
Published: May 2022

In this chapter, I analyse the contingent conditions that led to a revival of the research in foundations of quantum mechanics (FQM) in Italy in the early 1970s. These were primarily the social-political struggles for change of the ’68 left-wing movements, which deeply involved young physicists. They criticized the structures of science, regarded science as yet another manifestation of the capitalistic character of modern society. They thus saw in FQM a natural starting point to dismantling the certainties of contemporary physics and thus opening new room for a radical change in the practices and contents of physics. While most of their scientific agenda turned out to be unattainable –such as the sought breakdown of quantum mechanics by means of Bell’s theorem– it is remarkable that a critical mass of Italian physicists became professionally active in the at that time almost forgotten field of FQM.
Foundations of Quantum Physics in the Soviet Union
Authors: Martinez Jean-Philippe
Published: May 2022

This work highlights different episodes from the history of quantum theory in the Soviet Union. It discusses not only its scientific richness but also how the singularity of the socio-cultural and political context of the USSR played a role in the scientific creativity of its physicists. Indeed, whether it was through the collectivist approach in quantum physics, a permanent questioning of the Copenhagen interpretation or the development of statistical alternatives, Soviet contributors to a better understanding of the foundations of quantum mechanics proved to be more original and devoted to their science than influenced by their environment and the Marxist philosophy of dialectical materialism. The greatest weakness of this milieu, namely its authoritative character, also proved to be one of its strengths: It forced quantum mechanics specialists to thoroughly examine the established truths and to look for alternatives.
Early Japanese Reactions to the Interpretation of Quantum Mechanics, 1927–1943
Authors: Ito Kenji
Published: May 2022

This chapter investigates how Japanese scientists and other intellectuals responded to foundational questions of quantum mechanics from the late 1920s to the early 1940s. Avoiding a culturalist approach, it emphasizes diverse local intellectual and historical contexts of the Japanese debates over quantum mechanics, which involved not only scientists, but also science journalists, Marxists, and Kyoto school philosophers. Starting with Nishina Yoshio’s early encounter with Niels Bohr’s complementarity, it examines how Japanese physicists incorporated (or not) conceptual issues of quantum mechanics into their textbooks, education, and research. It discusses how science writers, such as Ishiwara Jun, wrote about them, and how intellectuals with different philosophical standpoints, in particular Marxists such as Taketani Mituo and Kyoto Scholl philosophers such as Tanabe Hajime debated over them in response to incidents like the publication of the Einstein-Podolsky-Rosen paper in 1935 and Bohr’s visit to Japan in 1937.
Form and Meaning
Authors: Simon Josep
Published: May 2022

Textbooks are both classic and subaltern subjects in the history of quantum physics. They featured prominently in path-breaking projects such as Sources for History of Quantum Physics and in Thomas Kuhn’s theoretical challenge. They have subsequently occupied a well-defined, but epistemologically marginal place in contemporary scholarship on quantum mechanics. In contrast, this chapter presents textbooks and pedagogy as a driving force in the making of quantum theory, by reconsidering old and new contributions to the history and philosophy of quantum mechanics in a different framework stressing the intersections of research, lecturing, and writing in the making of standard knowledge. Moreover, it advocates for a more methodologically reflexive use of scientific publication genres as sources. Through historiographical reflection, some exemplary case studies, and an appeal to historical craft, this chapter proposes new ways of understanding the making of quantum mechanics as disciplinary knowledge.
Philosophical Issues raised by Quantum Theory and its Interpretations
Authors: Myrvold Wayne C.
Published: May 2022

This chapter serves as an introduction to the philosophical issues raised by quantum theory. It begins with a brief overview of the formalism of quantum theory. The so-called “measurement problem” is introduced, and the main approaches to it surveyed. We then discuss the implications of quantum theory for metaphysics. One question concerns the implications of quantum nonlocality for our understanding of spacetime and of causality. Another has to do with the ontology of quantum states. Should these be regarded as physically real, and, if so, what sort of reality should be ascribed to them?
Chien-Shiung Wu’s Contributions to Experimental Philosophy
Authors: Silva Indianara
Published: May 2022

This chapter explores Chien-Shiung Wu’s contributions to experimental philosophy in American twentieth-century physics. While the Wu-Shaknov (WS) experiment helped reopen discussions on the EPR argument through Bohm and Aharonov’s work, the Kasday-Ullman-Wu (KUW) experiment tested the local hidden variables models and the usual quantum mechanics. Both contributions teach us about the different ways physicists, experiments, and data can enrich scientific culture.
Quantum Interpretations and 20th Century Philosophy of Science
Authors: Ryckman Thomas
Published: May 2022

Quantum mechanics was but scantily discussed by philosophers before WWII. Even the Bohr-Einstein debate and the 1935 EPR “paradox” were largely ignored, presumably on the assumption that Bohr’s reply settled any philosophical debate. The complacency was uprooted by D. Bohm in 1952, one response to which was the birth of the “Copenhagen interpretation”. Responding to L. Rosenfeld’s defense of the new orthodoxy, P.K. Feyerabend launched a critique of empiricism and positivism, coinciding in part with T.S. Kuhn’s post-positivist philosophy of science yet rejecting the key concepts of “normal science” and “paradigm” as anti-progressive dogma redolent of Copenhagen. Feyerabend’s advocacy of theoretical and methodological pluralism from 1960 to 1975 became increasingly radical, prompting other pluralisms and relativisms, currents that publicly surfaced in the “science wars” of the 1990s. In a dialectically opposite direction, Bohm’s theory inspired an “experimental metaphysics” after J.S. Bell’s papers (1964-66) demonstrating a local realist theory will empirically contradict quantum mechanics.
Bohr and the Epistemological Lesson of Quantum Mechanics
Authors: Osnaghi Stefano
Published: May 2022

While Bohr developed his views independently of any direct philosophical influence, his reflection on the relationship between epistemology and semantics was remarkably in phase with the philosophical avant-garde of his time. Bohr borrowed some concepts and ideas from the neo-Kantian and pragmatist traditions, but what sharply distinguishes his approach from those of other philosophising physicists is the peculiar focus on language (along with a dismissive attitude towards foundationalist concerns, which echoes Wittgenstein’s in some respects). Bohr was convinced of the need to draw a general lesson from quantum mechanics – a lesson that went beyond the theory’s empirical content and concerned the very nature of objectivity and knowledge. Specifically, he thought that understanding quantum mechanics implied a rigorous analysis of the semantic presuppositions of physics and that such an analysis revealed the existence of well-entrenched representational preconceptions, which placed undue limitations upon the account of rational practices.