Lakatos on crucial experiments and the history of interpretations of quantum mechanics

Peter Szegedi

pp. 101-111

in: George Kampis, Ladislav Kvasz, Michael Stöltzner (eds), Appraising Lakatos, Berlin, Springer, 2002

Abstrakt

Let us begin with a few words on the notion of crucial experiment, or experimentum crucis.¹ The idea appears in the seventeenth century in Francis Bacon's Novum Organum, as the instantia crucis — that is, a crucial instance, or in the English edition, "instance of the fingerpost" One of Bacon's examples of crucial instances is that of the decision between two theories of tides: according to the first, the tides are due to a to-and-fro motion of the waters, as in a basin, while the second theory asserts that the tides are a periodic lifting and falling of the waters. Bacon's crucial question was: Are there high tides at the same times at the coasts of Spain and Florida as well as at those of China and Peru? These coasts are at opposite sides of the imaginary basins, so the basin theory does not allow a positive answer to this question.

Cited authors

Bacon Francis

Lakatos Imre