Recent Revival Of Schrödinger’s Ideas On Interpreting Quantum Mechanics, And The Relevance Of Their Early Experimental Critique

E. Schrödinger’s early ideas on interpreting quantum mechanics, as well as their later reformulation, have been recently reexamined by historians and revived among philosophers of quantum mechanics. The neo‐Schrödingerian doctrines of relational holism and emergentism share with both Schrödinger’s earlier and later views the common assumption that the corpuscular properties of quantum systems can be successfully discarded, and the discontinuities related to measurements successfully reformulated in wave‐mechanical terms or within the framework of quantum field theory. I argue that these doctrines fail to acknowledge the significance of the experimental results concerning electron scattering, in the face of which Schrödinger himself abandoned his 1926 interpretation, and which haunted his return to these ideas in the 1930s. I conclude that the neo‐Schrödingerian trend should be cautioned by these experimental results, in which the corpuscular properties may not be “explained away” in wave‐mechanical terms.