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Philosophers

Mortimer Adler
Rogers Albritton
Alexander of Aphrodisias
Samuel Alexander
William Alston
Anaximander
G.E.M.Anscombe
Anselm
Louise Antony
Thomas Aquinas
Aristotle
David Armstrong
Harald Atmanspacher
Robert Audi
Augustine
J.L.Austin
A.J.Ayer
Alexander Bain
Mark Balaguer
Jeffrey Barrett
William Barrett
William Belsham
Henri Bergson
George Berkeley
Isaiah Berlin
Richard J. Bernstein
Bernard Berofsky
Robert Bishop
Max Black
Susanne Bobzien
Emil du Bois-Reymond
Hilary Bok
Laurence BonJour
George Boole
Émile Boutroux
Daniel Boyd
F.H.Bradley
C.D.Broad
Michael Burke
Lawrence Cahoone
C.A.Campbell
Joseph Keim Campbell
Rudolf Carnap
Carneades
Nancy Cartwright
Gregg Caruso
Ernst Cassirer
David Chalmers
Roderick Chisholm
Chrysippus
Cicero
Randolph Clarke
Samuel Clarke
Anthony Collins
Antonella Corradini
Diodorus Cronus
Jonathan Dancy
Donald Davidson
Mario De Caro
Democritus
Daniel Dennett
Jacques Derrida
René Descartes
Richard Double
Fred Dretske
John Dupré
John Earman
Laura Waddell Ekstrom
Epictetus
Epicurus
Austin Farrer
Herbert Feigl
Arthur Fine
John Martin Fischer
Frederic Fitch
Owen Flanagan
Luciano Floridi
Philippa Foot
Alfred Fouilleé
Harry Frankfurt
Richard L. Franklin
Bas van Fraassen
Michael Frede
Gottlob Frege
Peter Geach
Edmund Gettier
Carl Ginet
Alvin Goldman
Gorgias
Nicholas St. John Green
H.Paul Grice
Ian Hacking
Ishtiyaque Haji
Stuart Hampshire
W.F.R.Hardie
Sam Harris
William Hasker
R.M.Hare
Georg W.F. Hegel
Martin Heidegger
Heraclitus
R.E.Hobart
Thomas Hobbes
David Hodgson
Shadsworth Hodgson
Baron d'Holbach
Ted Honderich
Pamela Huby
David Hume
Ferenc Huoranszki
Frank Jackson
William James
Lord Kames
Robert Kane
Immanuel Kant
Tomis Kapitan
Walter Kaufmann
Jaegwon Kim
William King
Hilary Kornblith
Christine Korsgaard
Saul Kripke
Thomas Kuhn
Andrea Lavazza
Christoph Lehner
Keith Lehrer
Gottfried Leibniz
Jules Lequyer
Leucippus
Michael Levin
Joseph Levine
George Henry Lewes
C.I.Lewis
David Lewis
Peter Lipton
C. Lloyd Morgan
John Locke
Michael Lockwood
Arthur O. Lovejoy
E. Jonathan Lowe
John R. Lucas
Lucretius
Alasdair MacIntyre
Ruth Barcan Marcus
Tim Maudlin
James Martineau
Nicholas Maxwell
Storrs McCall
Hugh McCann
Colin McGinn
Michael McKenna
Brian McLaughlin
John McTaggart
Paul E. Meehl
Uwe Meixner
Alfred Mele
Trenton Merricks
John Stuart Mill
Dickinson Miller
G.E.Moore
Thomas Nagel
Otto Neurath
Friedrich Nietzsche
John Norton
P.H.Nowell-Smith
Robert Nozick
William of Ockham
Timothy O'Connor
Parmenides
David F. Pears
Charles Sanders Peirce
Derk Pereboom
Steven Pinker
Plato
Karl Popper
Porphyry
Huw Price
H.A.Prichard
Protagoras
Hilary Putnam
Willard van Orman Quine
Frank Ramsey
Ayn Rand
Michael Rea
Thomas Reid
Charles Renouvier
Nicholas Rescher
C.W.Rietdijk
Richard Rorty
Josiah Royce
Bertrand Russell
Paul Russell
Gilbert Ryle
Jean-Paul Sartre
Kenneth Sayre
T.M.Scanlon
Moritz Schlick
Arthur Schopenhauer
John Searle
Wilfrid Sellars
Alan Sidelle
Ted Sider
Henry Sidgwick
Walter Sinnott-Armstrong
J.J.C.Smart
Saul Smilansky
Michael Smith
Baruch Spinoza
L. Susan Stebbing
Isabelle Stengers
George F. Stout
Galen Strawson
Peter Strawson
Eleonore Stump
Francisco Suárez
Richard Taylor
Kevin Timpe
Mark Twain
Peter Unger
Peter van Inwagen
Manuel Vargas
John Venn
Kadri Vihvelin
Voltaire
G.H. von Wright
David Foster Wallace
R. Jay Wallace
W.G.Ward
Ted Warfield
Roy Weatherford
C.F. von Weizsäcker
William Whewell
Alfred North Whitehead
David Widerker
David Wiggins
Bernard Williams
Timothy Williamson
Ludwig Wittgenstein
Susan Wolf

Scientists

David Albert
Michael Arbib
Walter Baade
Bernard Baars
Jeffrey Bada
Leslie Ballentine
Marcello Barbieri
Gregory Bateson
Horace Barlow
John S. Bell
Mara Beller
Charles Bennett
Ludwig von Bertalanffy
Susan Blackmore
Margaret Boden
David Bohm
Niels Bohr
Ludwig Boltzmann
Emile Borel
Max Born
Satyendra Nath Bose
Walther Bothe
Jean Bricmont
Hans Briegel
Leon Brillouin
Stephen Brush
Henry Thomas Buckle
S. H. Burbury
Melvin Calvin
Donald Campbell
Sadi Carnot
Anthony Cashmore
Eric Chaisson
Gregory Chaitin
Jean-Pierre Changeux
Rudolf Clausius
Arthur Holly Compton
John Conway
Jerry Coyne
John Cramer
Francis Crick
E. P. Culverwell
Antonio Damasio
Olivier Darrigol
Charles Darwin
Richard Dawkins
Terrence Deacon
Lüder Deecke
Richard Dedekind
Louis de Broglie
Stanislas Dehaene
Max Delbrück
Abraham de Moivre
Bernard d'Espagnat
Paul Dirac
Hans Driesch
John Eccles
Arthur Stanley Eddington
Gerald Edelman
Paul Ehrenfest
Manfred Eigen
Albert Einstein
George F. R. Ellis
Hugh Everett, III
Franz Exner
Richard Feynman
R. A. Fisher
David Foster
Joseph Fourier
Philipp Frank
Steven Frautschi
Edward Fredkin
Benjamin Gal-Or
Howard Gardner
Lila Gatlin
Michael Gazzaniga
Nicholas Georgescu-Roegen
GianCarlo Ghirardi
J. Willard Gibbs
James J. Gibson
Nicolas Gisin
Paul Glimcher
Thomas Gold
A. O. Gomes
Brian Goodwin
Joshua Greene
Dirk ter Haar
Jacques Hadamard
Mark Hadley
Patrick Haggard
J. B. S. Haldane
Stuart Hameroff
Augustin Hamon
Sam Harris
Ralph Hartley
Hyman Hartman
Jeff Hawkins
John-Dylan Haynes
Donald Hebb
Martin Heisenberg
Werner Heisenberg
John Herschel
Basil Hiley
Art Hobson
Jesper Hoffmeyer
Don Howard
John H. Jackson
William Stanley Jevons
Roman Jakobson
E. T. Jaynes
Pascual Jordan
Eric Kandel
Ruth E. Kastner
Stuart Kauffman
Martin J. Klein
William R. Klemm
Christof Koch
Simon Kochen
Hans Kornhuber
Stephen Kosslyn
Daniel Koshland
Ladislav Kovàč
Leopold Kronecker
Rolf Landauer
Alfred Landé
Pierre-Simon Laplace
Karl Lashley
David Layzer
Joseph LeDoux
Gerald Lettvin
Gilbert Lewis
Benjamin Libet
David Lindley
Seth Lloyd
Hendrik Lorentz
Werner Loewenstein
Josef Loschmidt
Ernst Mach
Donald MacKay
Henry Margenau
Owen Maroney
David Marr
Humberto Maturana
James Clerk Maxwell
Ernst Mayr
John McCarthy
Warren McCulloch
N. David Mermin
George Miller
Stanley Miller
Ulrich Mohrhoff
Jacques Monod
Vernon Mountcastle
Emmy Noether
Donald Norman
Alexander Oparin
Abraham Pais
Howard Pattee
Wolfgang Pauli
Massimo Pauri
Wilder Penfield
Roger Penrose
Steven Pinker
Colin Pittendrigh
Walter Pitts
Max Planck
Susan Pockett
Henri Poincaré
Daniel Pollen
Ilya Prigogine
Hans Primas
Zenon Pylyshyn
Henry Quastler
Adolphe Quételet
Pasco Rakic
Nicolas Rashevsky
Lord Rayleigh
Frederick Reif
Jürgen Renn
Giacomo Rizzolati
Emil Roduner
Juan Roederer
Jerome Rothstein
David Ruelle
David Rumelhart
Tilman Sauer
Ferdinand de Saussure
Jürgen Schmidhuber
Erwin Schrödinger
Aaron Schurger
Sebastian Seung
Thomas Sebeok
Franco Selleri
Claude Shannon
Charles Sherrington
David Shiang
Abner Shimony
Herbert Simon
Dean Keith Simonton
Edmund Sinnott
B. F. Skinner
Lee Smolin
Ray Solomonoff
Roger Sperry
John Stachel
Henry Stapp
Tom Stonier
Antoine Suarez
Leo Szilard
Max Tegmark
Teilhard de Chardin
Libb Thims
William Thomson (Kelvin)
Richard Tolman
Giulio Tononi
Peter Tse
Alan Turing
Francisco Varela
Vlatko Vedral
Mikhail Volkenstein
Heinz von Foerster
Richard von Mises
John von Neumann
Jakob von Uexküll
C. S. Unnikrishnan
C. H. Waddington
John B. Watson
Daniel Wegner
Steven Weinberg
Paul A. Weiss
Herman Weyl
John Wheeler
Wilhelm Wien
Norbert Wiener
Eugene Wigner
E. O. Wilson
Günther Witzany
Stephen Wolfram
H. Dieter Zeh
Semir Zeki
Ernst Zermelo
Wojciech Zurek
Konrad Zuse
Fritz Zwicky

Presentations

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Free Will
Mental Causation
James Symposium
 
Walther Bothe

Walther Bothe shared the Nobel prize in 1954 with Max Born for his experimental confirmation of Albert Einstein's theory of light quanta, and his proof that the energy was conserved for each Compton electron-photon scattering event. This disproved the 1924 Bohr-Kramers-Slater theory that light was sometimes a wave, at other times a particle, and that energy was only conserved statistically over large numbers of events.

Einstein asked that this work be done and he was pleased that his theory of light quanta was perfectly confirmed. Until the early 1920's, Einstein was alone in his belief (since 1905) that light consisted of quanta (later called photons) and that wave properties were the result of averaging over large numbers of light particles. Einstein suggested (but never published) the idea that the waves provided what he called a "ghost-field" that guided the particles' motions. This became the deBroglie-Bohm "pilot-wave" theory of quantum mechanics.

The standard interpretation of the quantum-mechanical wave function that evolves deterministically according to the Schrödinger equation is that it is the probability of finding a quantum particle in a given state. Einstein wanted the wave to determine the location of the particle. He was bothered to the end of his life that quantum mechanics was only a statistical theory and that it involved indeterministic chance. That was a "weakness in the theory," he said. Bothe confirmed an important aspect of the theory.

Until the work of Compton and Bothe, virtually no one but Einstein believed in the reality of light quanta, and that they displayed irreducible chance in the timing and direction of their emission.

Nobel Lecture (excerpt)
It was in 1924 that I came across the theoretical paper by Bohr, Kramers, and Slater, which had just been published and which suggested a possible interpretation of the wave-particle dualism in the accepted description of the properties of light. This must be understood to mean the experimental fact that light of all wavelengths behaves as a wave process (interference) with pure propagation, but behaves as particles (light quanta: photo-effect, Compton effect) on conversion into other types of energy. The new idea consisted in denying strict validity to the energy-impulse law. In the individual or elementary process, so long as only a single act of emission was involved, the laws of conservation were held to be statistically satisfied only, to become valid for a macroscopic totality of a very large number of elementary processes only, so that there was no conflict with the available empirical evidence. It was immediately obvious that this question would have to be decided experimentally, before definite progress could be made. That such a decision was possible, Geiger and I agreed immediately, when I discussed the paper by Bohr, Kramers, and Slater with Geiger.

The experimental problem offered several means of attack. We decided in favour of an experiment with the effect discovered a short time previously by A.H. Compton, i.e. the scattering of light on practically free electrons. Apart from the scattered light, there occur the "recoil electrons" which had been observed and interpreted by C.T.R. Wilson in the cloud chamber, and by me both in the cloud chamber and by an ionization method. The "question to Nature" which the experiment was designed to answer could therefore be formulated as follows: is it exactly a scatter quantum and a recoil electron that are simultaneously emitted in the elementary process, or is there merely a statistical relationship between the two?

Meanwhile, Geiger had developed the so-called needle counter which has the advantage of responding not only to heavy particles but also to electrons, and therefore to light quanta of sufficiently high energy capable of releasing electrons within the counter.

Our arrangement therefore consisted of two needle counters, past the common front wall of which, without touching it, swept a beam of X-rays. The X-ray beam travelled in a hydrogen atmosphere; the Compton processes occurred in the one counter which indicated the recoil electrons, whereas only the scatter quanta were able to penetrate into the other counter and actuated it by electron release with very much lower probability. The readings of both counters were recorded side by side on a moving paper chart. In this way we succeeded after a few failures to establish the accuracy of any temporal "coincidence" between the two pointer readings as being 10-4 sec. Film consumption however was so enormous that our laboratory with the film strips strung up for drying sometimes resembled an industrial laundry.

The final result we obtained was that systematic coincidences do indeed occur with the frequency that could be estimated from the experimental geometry and the response probabilities of the counters on the assumption that, in each elementary Compton process, a scatter quantum and a recoil electron are generated simultaneously. The strict validity of the law of the conservation of energy even in the elementary process had been demonstrated, and the ingenious way out of the wave-particle problem discussed by Bohr, Kramers, and Slater was shown to be a blind alley.

This result was confirmed by different researchers using various experimental arrangements. When, more than ten years later, some doubts as to the correctness of this result were voiced, I tried with my then assistant, H. Maier-Leibnitz, to supplement and improve the original experiment in one point: the object was to demonstrate both simultaneity and uniformity of direction of scatter quantum and recoil electron, as was to be expected according to Compton's theory, i.e. according to the laws of elastic impact between two bodies. On this occasion, we employed the energy-rich gamma radiation of a radiothorium preparation. Again, the result was clearly positive. This demonstrated both the conservation of energy and the conservation of the impulse.

The possibility of the purely statistical validity of the conservation theorems discussed by Bohr, Kramers, and Slater appeared sufficiently important to be tested in yet another case. A spherical wave is emitted in the elementary process of light emission. The problem was: can this spherical wave initiate an absorption act in one direction of emission only, as the energy theorem postulates, or can it do so also statistically independently in several directions, as is to be expected according to Bohr, Kramers, and Slater? It must be borne in mind in an experiment of this kind, that, by contrast with the Compton effect, the probability of demonstrating an absorption act may not be of an order of magnitude much below unity, because otherwise any systematic coincidences that might occur would be submerged in the inevitable accidental coincidences. This was achieved by harmonizing the radiation source (iron or copper-K-fluorescence radiation) and the gas charge of the needle counters (argon) erected on either side so that the absorption probability in the gas charge was as close as possible to unity. Besides, the solid angles which the two counters offered to the radiation source had to amount as far as possible to 2 p. The result of this experiment (1926) was that no systematic coincidences occurred, at least not with the frequency to be expected according to Bohr, Kramers, and Slater. Strict conservation of energy in the elementary process had thus been confirmed also by a negative experiment. The wave-particle problem was destined to remain open for a short time only. During this time I had the singular good fortune of being able to discuss the problem constantly with Einstein. Some experiments done at Einstein's suggestion yielded no decisively new result. The (at least formal) solution was provided by wave mechanics; it is contained simply in the assumption that the Schrödinger wave of a system consisting of n particles is a wave in the 3n-dimensional "configuration space".

Historical Significance of the Bothe-Geiger Experiment
It is little-known that during the birth of quantum mechanics Walther Bothe (1891-1957) published partly together with Hans Geiger (1882-1945) from 1923 to 1927 as much as twenty papers which all deal with photons (light quanta). About half of the publications are of experimental nature; the other deal with theoretical problems. Among the latter there is theoretical work on the photo effect, the interaction of light with free electrons and on the particle-wave dualism. In his final publication within this field Bothe found in 1927 the correct interpretation of Einstein’s results for the energy fluctuations of black body radiation.1,2 In his Nobel lecture (Nobel prize 1954, together with Max Born) Bothe mentioned “that during this time I had the singular fortune of being able to discuss the [wave particle] problem constantly with Einstein”.

Walther Bothe was an exceptional scientist, with likewise outstanding skills in theoretical and experimental physics. He studied mathematics, physics and chemistry in Berlin and entered the radiation laboratory of the Physikalisch Technische Reichsanstalt (PTR) in 1913. After participation in the First World War he returned to Berlin in 1920 to resume work at the PTR. Bothe was known all over his life to be able to work extremely self-concentrated.

Briefly after his return to the PTR Einstein proposed an experiment to prove his light quantum hypothesis for the light emitted by canal rays. Geiger and Bothe performed the experiment immediately and showed that the light emitted by moving atoms/ions will not be deflected in dispersing medias, in accordance with Einstein’s prediction for light quanta. But subsequent discussions led Einstein to the result, that both, the light quantum picture and the light wave picture would finally yield the same results. Nevertheless it is a pity, that the experiment itself was never published, since it was for the first time, that the particle-wave dualism became apparent in a thorough discussion of an experiment.

In this period Bothe became interested in the interaction of X-rays with matter. After extended experiments on the pressure dependence of the ionization probability due to the secondary ß-radiation he interpreted his results in fall 1923 correctly as due to Compton scattering of photons on electrons.3 From this we may convey, that at the end of 1923 Bothe himself had accepted the particle picture of light, at least for elementary processes. Thus he was well prepared when at the beginning of 1924, N. Bohr, H.A.Kramers and J.C.Slater postulated that in atomic processes causality, momentum and energy conservation ought to be valid only statistically, in order to keep at any instances the continuous wave description of light if interacting with matter.4 To prove or disprove this claim experimentally,

Bothe and Geiger firstly built up a coincidence experiment and showed with quite some experimental effort that in Compton scattering of X-rays on hydrogen the scattered protons and the scattered X-ray quanta reach the detectors within a time delay of only 0,1ms or less.5 This was historically the very first coincidence experiment with high time resolution. Soon afterwards Compton and Simon6 found in the scattering of X-rays on electrons that energy and momentum is conserved as well.

Even though the consequences of the Bothe–Geiger experiment are frequently discussed,7 little is present in historical debates about its “courageous” performance. In this context it is a pity that the notebook of this experiment does not exist in Bothe’s legacy at the Archive of the Max Planck Gesellschaft in Berlin. But, luckily enough, a notebook (Nr.7) exists for Bothe’s second experiment in the spirit of the Compton scattering experiment, which Bothe then performed alone.8 In this experiment Bothe used again two counters in coincidence and in opposite position (1800), but both were now able to detect scattered X-rays. The idea was, that he will observe no coincidences if the scattered X-rays consist of light quanta (Nadelstrahlung) and coincidences if the fluorescence light is to be described by continuous electromagnetic waves. The negative outcome (no coincidences) proved Einstein’s light quantum hypothesis once more. It was a null experiment, much harder to be performed and analyzed than the Compton scattering experiments with their finite signals.

Nevertheless, this experiment was in general never highly ranked in the past nor today. But Bothe himself considered it e.g. in a letter to a publishing company dated from 1949 as one of the most important ones he ever performed.9 This view was at least shared by Compton10 and enthusiastically by Einstein, since the outcome of Bothe’s fluorescence experiment was exactly what he was after when proposing the canal ray experiment.

From his publications and additionally from the notebook we can infer how Bothe performed experiments: caring of any detail and listing it, crosschecking the essential experimental steps, being very critical in respect to himself and in particular not being biased at all by theoretical expectations or predictions in assessing his own experimental results.

We finish with the remark that Einstein wrote in support of a proposal of von Laue to award the 1954 Nobel price to Bothe, referring to the Bothe–Geiger experiment. Thus finally Bothe’s seminal experimental and theoretical contributions to enlighten the wave-particle dualism were honored shortly before his death with this prestigious prize.

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