Criticism of Pauli’s Proposition…

By Kelley L. Ross, Ph.D.

It was intriguing to read about Pauli’s relationship with Jung and his ideas about using Jung in physics. I’m not sure it works very well, which of course is Pauli’s problem, not that of the admins. Yet I have some criticisms:

When you say: “As long as nobody’s looking, observing, or measuring this electron, it’s actually everywhere on the circle at once,” this overlooks the wave/particle duality and discounts the physical reality of the wave. The electron as a wave is an extended object, and it extends right around the atom, with varying magnitude. Trying to observe the electron collapses the wave function, and the electron, as a particle, appears at a discrete location. A lot of treatments of quantum mechanics don’t pay much attention to the wave function except when squared, as a probability distribution, but the wave is the only thing that accounts for interference effects and for the fact that the electron in an orbit cannot move without constantly emitting radiation – by which it would lose all its energy and collapse into the nucleus of the atom. This is what perplexed everyone until Bohr’s theory of the quantum atom. ...