Resonance between Bohr’s pragmatic use of classical concepts and von Neumann’s measurement formalism
Establish whether Niels Bohr’s claim that classical concepts function as a pragmatic recipe necessary to account for definite outcomes in quantum measurements aligns with a literal reading of the relevant sections on measurement in John von Neumann’s 1932 Die Mathematische Grundlagen der Quantenmechanik, thereby determining if Bohr and von Neumann are conceptually close on the universality of quantum mechanics.
References
In particular, I conjecture that the Bohr claim on the role of classical concepts as a pragmatic recipe, necessary to account for the emergence of a definite outcome at the end of a measurement process, in fact resonates quite closely with a literal understanding of the relevant sections of the von Neumann treatise on the measurement process; in this vein, the views of both Bohr and von Neumann turn out to have suffered from specular misunderstandings and misconceptions and, according to the analysis carried out in the present paper, they appear to be much closer than many have thought in the past.