An Unpublished Debate Brought to Light: Karl Popper's Enterprise against the Logic of Quantum Mechanics

Abstract

Karl Popper published, in 1968, a paper that allegedly found a flaw in a very influential article of Birkhoff and von Neumann, which pioneered the field of "quantum logic". Nevertheless, nobody rebutted Popper's criticism in print for several years. This has been called in the historiographical literature an "unsolved historical issue". Although Popper's proposal turned out to be merely based on misinterpretations and was eventually abandoned by the author himself, this paper aims at providing a resolution to such historical open issues. I show that (i) Popper's paper was just the tip of an iceberg of a much vaster campaign conducted by Popper against quantum logic (which encompassed several more unpublished papers that I retrieved); and (ii) that Popper's paper stimulated a heated debate that remained however confined within private correspondence.

17 pages, 1 table. Contains the reproduction of an unpublished rebut to Popper's 1968 paper on quantum logic (as figures in Appendix). Accepted for publication in Studies on History and Philosophy of Modern Physics