Nico van Kampen

“The scandal is that there are still many articles, discussions, and textbooks, which advertise various interpretations and philosophical profundities. In the seventeenth century Cartesians refused to accept Newton’s attraction because they could not accept a force that was not transmitted by a medium. Even now many physicists have not yet learned that they should adjust their ideas to the observed reality rather than the other way round.”

“Second, in order that a macroscopic apparatus can be influenced by the presence of a microscopic event it has to be prepared in a metastable initial state—think of the Wilson camera and the Geiger counter. The microscopic event triggers a macroscopically visible transition into the stable state. Of course this is irreversible and is accompanied by a thermodynamic increase of entropy.”