When Bohr got it wrong: the impact of a little-known paper on quantum theory

Michelson–Morley got it wrong too, but getting things wrong, when you know its wrong, its an advancement.

This is an interesting article due to the historical connections it makes. I mention the paper in question on p. 120 of my book about Noether’s Theorem (https://lee-phillips.org/noether) and quote Heisenberg on why violation of energy conservation, and therefore the paper, was unacceptable (something that the article doesn’t really discuss—after all, other conservation laws were abandoned or modified as needed): it’s because Noether’s Theorem shows that energy conservation is equivalent to invariance with regard to time translation, something that no one would be willing to give up. This means that energy must be conserved in every interaction, not just statistically.

BKS virtual field -> pilot wave?

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/De_Broglie%E2%80%93Bohm_theory

> “Its radically new approach paved the way for a greater understanding, that methods and concepts of classical physics could not be carried over in a future quantum mechanics.”

This is incorrect. The Hamiltonian in both statistical and quantum mechanics has the same basic structure. Quantization is the only real difference, but the other methods and concepts are structurally the same.

> It was also a crucial factor in Heisenberg’s argument that the probabilistic character of his matrix mechanics (and also of Schrödinger’s 1926 version of quantum mechanics, called wave mechanics) couldn’t be explained away as a statistical expression of our ignorance about the details, as it is in classical statistical mechanics.

Too bad that's an incorrect inference. Bohmian mechanics proves that this inference is incorrect, and it's not the only possibility either.