New Instruments and the Meaning of Quantum Mechanics

Abstract

Historians tracing the development of research into the foundations of quantum mechanics have yet to factor in the role of new scientific instrumentation. Yet physicists repeatedly stress its importance when they write about recent work. This paper looks at two experiments done in the 1980s to illuminate Niels Bohr's concept of complementarity. It lays out the novel instruments that were used and examines the motives of the theorists who proposed the experiments and the experimentalists who carried them out. Understanding their attitudes is one step towards exploring the part that "real" experiments played in reconfiguring foundations research.