7 - Quantum theory and our view of the world

Summary

When I was a student in Vienna, in the late 1940s, we had three physicists who were known to a wider public: Karl Przibram, Felix Ehrenhaft and Hans Thirring. Przibram was an experimentalist, a pupil of J. J. Thomson whom he often mentioned with reverence. Philosophers of science know him as the editor of a correspondence on wave mechanics between Schrödinger, Lorentz, Planck and Einstein. He was the brother of Hans Przibram, the biologist, and, I believe, the uncle of the neurophysiologist Karl Przibram. He talked with a subdued voice and wrote tiny equations on the blackboard. Occasionally his lectures were interrupted by shouting, laughing and trampling from below; that was Ehrenhaft's audience.

Ehrenhaft had been professor of theoretical and experimental physics in Vienna. He left when the Nazis came; he returned in 1947. By that time many physicists regarded him as a charlatan. He had produced and kept producing evidence for subelectrons, magnetic monopoles of mesoscopic size and magnetolysis, and he held that the inertial path was a spiral, not a geodesic. His attitude towards theory was identical with that of Lenard and Stark whom he often mentioned with approval. He challenged us to criticize him and laughed when he realized how strongly we believed in the excellence of say, Maxwell's equations without having calculated and tested specific effects.