Abner Shimony

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Abner Eliezer Shimony (born March 10, 1928 in Columbus (Ohio) , † August 8, 2015 in New Haven (Connecticut) ) was an American physicist and philosopher of science who dealt with the fundamentals of quantum theory.

Life

Shimony studied mathematics and philosophy at Yale University until 1948 and then went to Rudolf Carnap at the University of Chicago to study further in the field of the philosophy of science. Returning to Yale University in 1953, he received a PhD with a thesis supervised by Carnap. He then did his military service and went to Princeton University in 1955 , where he earned a second doctorate with the thesis Regression and Response in Thermodynamic Systems under the guidance of Eugene Wigner, who later won the Nobel Prize in Physics . From 1959 to 1968 he taught philosophy of science at MIT in Cambridge, Massachusetts . From 1968 he was a professor in the Department of Philosophy and Physics at Boston University . His 26 years of activity there was only interrupted by various guest stays at European research institutions.

Starting from the Einstein-Podolsky-Rosen paradox , Shimony dealt with the fundamental assumptions of quantum mechanics in a large number of physical and philosophical works, especially with the validity of Bell's inequality and its generalization (CHSH inequality with John Clauser , Michael Horne , Richard A. Get). In doing so, he incorporated new findings from quantum mechanical experiments, such as the GHZ experiment , into his philosophical considerations.

In 1998 Shimony became a Fellow of the American Physical Society . Since 1985 he was a member of the American Academy of Arts and Sciences . In 1996 he received the Lakatos Award for his two-volume work The Search for a Naturalistic World View , published in 1993 .

Fonts (selection)

  • Abner Shimony: The Search for a Naturalistic World View. Volume I: Scientific Method and Epistemology . Cambridge University Press, Cambridge 1993, ISBN 978-0-521-37744-7 (American English).
  • Abner Shimony: The Search for a Naturalistic World View. Volume II: Natural Science and Metaphysics . Cambridge University Press, Cambridge 1993, ISBN 978-0-521-37745-4 (American English).
  • Abner Shimony: Bell's Theorem. In: Stanford Encyclopedia of Philosophy. Stanford University, 2013, accessed July 5, 2016 .

Individual evidence

  1. Abner Shimony in the Mathematics Genealogy Project (English)Template: MathGenealogyProject / Maintenance / id used
  2. ^ John F. Clauser, Michael A. Horne, Abner Shimony, Richard A. Holt: Proposed Experiment to Test Hidden-Variable Theories . In: Physical Review Letters . tape 23 , 1969, p. 880-884 , doi : 10.1103 / PhysRevLett.23.880 .
  3. ^ Daniel M. Greenberger, Michael A. Horne, Abner Shimony, Anton Zeilinger : Bell's theorem without inequalities . In: American Journal of Physics . tape 58 , no. 12 , 1990, pp. 1131-1143 , doi : 10.1119 / 1.16243 .
  4. Book of Members 1780 – present, Chapter S. (PDF; 1.4 MB) In: American Academy of Arts and Sciences (amacad.org). Retrieved July 27, 2017 (English).

Web links