Einstein vs Lorentz, Planck and Bohr: Tragedy

Modern physics as relativity theory + quantum mechanics was born out of two misconceptions formed in the mind of the young Einstein as patent clerk in Bern in 1905 with little scientific training, but strong ambition to contribute to the emerging modern physics of  

1. Blackbody radiation.
2. Photoelectricity. 
3. Apparent absence of a unique aether carrying electromagnetic waves.  

In 1900 Planck had derived Planck's Law of blackbody radiation based on a smallest quantum of energy $h\nu$ connected to radiation/light of frequency $\nu$ with $h=6.55\times 10^{-34}$ Jouleseconds named Planck's constant. Planck did not assign any physical meaning to the smallest quantum $h\nu$ and viewed it simply as a "mathematical trick" used to derive Planck 's Law. 

In one of Einstein's 5 articles from the "miraculous year" 1905, Einstein assigns the quantum $h\nu$ a physical meaning as the energy of a "photon" as a "light particle" in a heuristic explanation of 2. Einstein thus did what Planck had said does not make any sense. In 1926 the mysterious quantum $h\nu$ appeared in Schrödinger's equation for the Hydrogen atom as the basic mathematical model of quantum mechanics.

In another 1905 article Einstein assigned the Lorentz transformation a physical meaning, which Lorentz had said would not make any sense, and so formed his Special Theory of Relativity SR.

Einstein thus contributed to the formation of modern physics in 1905 by attributing physical meanings to both Planck's quantum $h\nu$ and the Lorentz transformation, in direct contradiction to both Planck and Lorentz.  

As time went on and the authority of Planck and Lorentz faded, Einstein's ideas about physicality of photons and the Lorentz transformation slowly gained support, but when they became the standard of the new Quantum Mechanics of Bohr-Born-Heisenberg-Dirac in the 1930s, then Einstein said: Stop, QM is no longer real physics!  Only Schrödinger said the same thing, but both were efficiently cancelled by Bohr. 

Einstein thus started out and ended as a tragic figure. First he genuinely misunderstood Planck and

Lorentz about physical reality and so contributed the development of a new form of physics, which he on good grounds criticised for lacking physicality. The irony was that physicists listened when he was wrong but not when he was right.   

Observation Obsession of Modern Physics

Do you believe that what you cannot see or hear does not exist?

Modern physics in the form of quantum mechanics is troubled for several reasons by the fundamental role given to observation including measurement as the expression of an instrumental antirealist view focussing on only what you can see or directly observe/measure, as compared to a wider realist view of what is.  

First, the measurement process is viewed to interfere with the system state being observed/measured, which is the problem of "collapse of the wave function" into a specific result from many possibilities as an effect of the measurement process. This is the observation of a dead or alive Schrödinger cat decided by the process of opening the Schrödinger box. Totally mysterious! 

Second, the Heisenberg Uncertainty Principle states that "complementary observables" such as position and velocity/momentum cannot both be measured with precision. Mysterious!

Third, the interpretation of the wave function as a probability is filled with mystery. What is the meaning of making one measurement of a an observable which is a probability? What do you learn by tossing a dice once?

Fourth, focussing on direct observation/measurement leads to the extreme view that the Sun evaporates to nothing when it settles in the evening, only to reappear every morning. Totally mysterious!

This aspect connects to the previous post on the connection between gravitational potential $\phi (x)$ and mass density $\rho (x)$ through the relation $\rho =\Delta\phi$ where $\Delta$ is the Laplacian differential operator with respect to $x$ as Euclidean space coordinate. 

The standard view is to consider mass density to be primordial because we can directly see the Sun, while we cannot directly see the gravitational potential of the Sun. This view comes with the unresolvable problem of instant action at distance. Very troubling!

But if we give up the antirealist instrumental view, then we may consider the gravitational potential $\phi$ to be primordial from which mass density $\rho$ is obtained by differentiation as an instant local operation, which admittedly has mysterious aspects but does not suffer from the unresolvable troubles of the standard view.

Summing up, we have thus found arguments against a philosophy in the spirit of Niels Bohr focussing on what can be measured rather than a wider ontology of what is.