Innsbruck, Innrain 55
18 November 1950
Dear Einstein,
It seems to me that the concept of probability is terribly mishandled these days. Probability surely has as its substance a statement as to whether something is or is not the case—an uncertain statement, to be sure. But nevertheless it has meaning only if one is indeed convinced that the something in question quite definitely either is or is not the case. A probabilistic assertion presupposes the full reality of its subject. No reasonable person would express a conjecture as to whether Caesar rolled a five with his dice at the Rubicon. But the quantum mechanics people sometimes act as if probabilistic statements were to be applied just to events whose reality is vague.
The conception of a world that really exists is based on there being a far-reaching common experience of many individuals, in fact of all individuals who come into the same or a similar situation with respect to the object concerned. Perhaps instead of “common experience” one should say “experiences that can be transformed into each other in a simple way”. This proper basis of reality is set aside as trivial by the positivists when they always want to speak only in the form: if “I” make a measurement then “I” “find” this or that. (And that is to be the only reality.)
It seems to me that what I call the construction of an external world that really exists is identical with what you call the describability of the individual situation that occurs only once—different as the phrasing may be. For it is just because they prohibit our asking what really “is”, that is, which state of affairs really occurs in the individual case, that the positivists succeed in making us settle for a kind of collective description. They accuse us of metaphysical heresy if we want to adhere to this “reality”. That should be countered by saying that the metaphysical significance of this reality does not matter to us at all. It comes about for us as, so to speak, the intersection pattern of the determinations of many—indeed of all conceivable—individual observers. It is a condensation of their findings for economy of thought, which would fall apart without any connections if we wanted to give up this mode of thought before we have found an equivalent that at least yields the same thing. The present quantum mechanics supplies no equivalent. It is not conscious of the problem at all; it passes it by with blithe disinterest.
It is probably justified in requiring a transformation of the image of the real world as it has been constructed in the last 300 years, since the re-awakening of physics, based on the discovery of Galileo and Newton that bodies determine each other’s accelerations. That was taken into account in that we interpreted the velocity as well as the position as instantaneous properties of anything real. That worked for a while. And now it seems to work no longer. One must therefore go back 300 years and reflect on how one could have proceeded differently at that time, and how the whole subsequent development would then be modified. No wonder that puts us into boundless confusion!
Warmest regards!
Yours,
E. Schrödinger