The Winding Road to Foundations: Measurements and Prejudices in the Quantum Century

The claim that dogmatism, or certain misconceptions within the physics community, hindered theoretical progress during the first decades of quantum theory has been separately made in two distinct cases. The first concerns the discovery of Bell’s inequalities in 1964, nearly forty years after the formulation of quantum theory, despite the 1935 famous paper by Einstein, Podolsky, and Rosen on the one hand, and the widespread use of non-product, “entangled,” states in atomic, molecular, and solid-state physics, on the other. The second appears in the above remark by Richard Feynman in his 1964 lectures, concerning the discovery of the Aharonov–Bohm effect in 1959, more than thirty years after Schrödinger’s equation.

This talk offers a historical and epistemological analysis of these two cases, contrasting the actual discoveries with earlier oversights. Focusing on conceptual shifts associated with the emergence of quantum foundations in the late 1950s and 1960s, as well as on developments in experimental and applied physics, I examine how theoretical progress in physics can be shaped both by interpretational stances and by experimental possibilities, and how these two factors are related.