The difficult legacy of quantum theory

Abstract

In the paper we analyse Paul Forman's (1971) notorious thesis stating that the Spenglerian intellectual atmosphere of the postwar Weimar Germany, hostile to any rational, mechanistic, causal and deterministic philosophy of science, is greatly responsible for the fact that quantum mechanics has been formulated and interpreted by the founding fathers as a theory dispensing with causality. We take the example of quantum superposition to make a case for Forman's thesis.