At the end of the 1920’s, purely wave-mechanical accounts of atomic and subatomic processes were quite numerous, due to the relative familiarity of physicists with Schrödinger’s wave equation. The interpretative weakness of these accounts, as denounced by Heisenberg, was that they were seemingly difficult to reconcile with the discontinuity of microscopic phenomena, and especially with the concept of particle. This difficulty is an early statement of the famous measurement problem of quantum mechanics. But Nevill Mott demonstrated that one can perfectly bypass the measurement problem, and yet offer a coherent account of quantum processes.
The most elaborated statement of his strategy of avoidance was presented in his theory of a-ray tracks in a cloud chamber, published in 1929. The performative solution (or dissolution) of the measurement problem presented in this paper of Nevill Mott is found to be remarkably convincing, and able to inspire arenewal of the debate about the interpretation of quantum mechanics almost one centuryafter its publication
