Heisenberg Uncertainty Principle and the Particle-Wave Duality (original) (raw)
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2005
Quantum mechanics is not something you would have guessed. The moment you juxtapose quantum mechanics and everyday experience, the mysteries of how the former relates to, much less explains, the latter seem to have no end. Scientists are predisposed to take the obviousness of the world for granted (rightfully so) while trying to explain and justify quantum mechanics. Many philosophers also take the obviousness of the world for granted (improperly so). But there are a few philosophers who have taken note that the very obviousness of the world is rather surprising. It's surprising because that which is so obvious is at the same time so unobtrusive; it is so obvious it practically insists that we overlook it. Why does the world already make sense to us, at least in an unreflective way, the moment we turn our attention to it, before we've had a chance to formulate the first question about it? The child contends with and utilizes gravity long before its unceasing effects arouse curiosity. Upon a moment's reflection, we can see that our first tentative intellectual steps toward understanding, like learning our first musical tune, are already upheld by a robust commitment to the consistency and congruity of sensuous experience. We enter the world with a basic commitment to the world, what Merleau-Ponty called "perceptual faith."
QUANTUM MECHANICS: A Revisionist History
This revisionist essay aimed at educated people who have learned physics from pop TV 'science'. It was written to correct the false impression of the historical development of Quantum Theory that has unfortunately become accepted as orthodoxy and has even entered popular culture (TV and book popularizations via the ‘magic’ word “Quantum”). This essay is a highly boiled-down version of a much larger paper aimed at professionals who are quite familiar with the technical outline. The implicit message here (and made explicit in the technical paper) is that both mathematical evolution and new physics experiments both threatened the 2,500-year dominance of the trio of traditional philosophy, physics and mathematics. The mathematical revolution will be omitted here as it is much too technical for a general audience but the ‘hidden’ story of quantum physics should be understandable to anyone with a strong imagination while recognizing the persistence of traditional ‘continuous’ concepts.
Quantum Theory: A Pragmatist Approach
The British Journal for the Philosophy of Science, 2012
While its applications have made quantum theory arguably the most successful theory in physics, its interpretation continues to be the subject of lively debate within the community of physicists and philosophers concerned with conceptual foundations. This situation poses a problem for a pragmatist for whom meaning derives from use. While disputes about how to use quantum theory have arisen from time to time, they have typically been quickly resolved, and consensus reached, within the relevant scientific sub-community. Yet rival accounts of the meaning of quantum theory continue to proliferate 1. In this article I offer a diagnosis of this situation and outline a pragmatist solution to the problem it poses, leaving further details for subsequent articles. 1 In addition to multiple variants of the Copenhagen interpretation, we now have Everettian interpretations of several kinds (many worlds, many minds, ...), the existential interpretation, the transactional interpretation, decoherent histories interpretations, relational interpretations, modal interpretations, de Broglie-Bohm interpretations, quantum Bayesian interpretations, etc. 2 This may be a situation of a certain type, or a token of that type.
A Realist Analysis of Six Controversial Quantum Issues
Mario Bunge: A Centenary Festschrift, 2019
This paper presents a philosophically realistic analysis of quantization, field-particle duality, superposition, entanglement, nonlocality, and measurement. These are logically related: Realistically understanding measurement depends on realistically understanding superposition, entanglement, and nonlocality; understanding these three depends on understanding field-particle duality and quantization. This paper resolves all six, based on a realistic view of standard quantum physics. It concludes that, for these issues, standard quantum physics is consistent with scientific practice since Copernicus: Nature exists on its own and science's goal is to understand its operating principles, which are independent of humans. Quantum theory need not be regarded as merely the study of what humans can know about the microscopic world, but can instead view it as the study of real quanta such as electrons, photons, and atoms. This position has long been argued by Mario Bunge.
One unorthodox view of the Heisenberg uncertainty principle (english)
It has long been clear, that human's ideas about the structure of surrounds him world are correspond to its world only partly. This truth is banal, but only recognition of this fact today is not sufficient. It appears that it's time to make the next step in scientific knowledge and to try to create (once again!) The New Model of the World which is to near understanding of the World as it is.
This study investigates the question of why quantum mechanics still lacks a generally-accepted interpretation in spite of a century of serious deliberation. It is guided by the question whether quantum mechanics requires a radical rethinking of the fundamental ontological and epistemological presuppositions on which the current world-view, a conception of nature adopted at the turn of the modern era, is based.
The Quantum Paradigm and Challenging the Objectivity Assumption
Most interpretations of quantum theory fail to provide a fundamental, complete, self-consistent account of nature describing physical reality itself, as opposed to merely yielding predictions about results of experiments and observations. A paradigm providing a self-consistent foundation for quantum theory and a description of the reality it refers to, generalized to a worldview, is a Quantum Paradigm, where 'paradigm' is defined as structure of experiential reality. We assert that the fundamental obstruction in the quest for a quantum paradigm is the assumption of objectivity. The subject-object distinction, drawn within experience, has within the natural sciences degenerated into a dichotomy—an absolute split into separate realms—with scientists adopting the classical paradigm where the object pole of experience ("objective reality") can be studied independently from the subject pole ("the experiencer"), with a presupposition that this procedure yields a fundamental description of nature. In fact, the subjective is often eliminated altogether as a fundamental category, and reduced to an epiphenomenon of objective processes. We claim this objectivity assumption precludes a full comprehension and a paradox-free formulation of quantum theory. By challenging this presupposition, i.e. leaving the question open, a coherent understanding of quantum nature falls naturally into place, providing appropriate foundation for quantum theory and an associated world-view. The resulting Quantum Paradigm is "realist" in the sense that it provides a description of what is actually happening: namely the arena of all happening is Mind or Consciousness—from which mind and matter, subject and object, individual and collective, and time and space co-dependently arise. The subject matter of quantum theory then becomes the fundamental mind-function of distinction ("measurement"), resulting in information and its statistical correlations. The message of quantum mechanics is surprising: the basic components of objects—the particles, electrons, quarks, etc.—cannot be thought of as 'self-existent'. The reality that they, and hence all objects, are components of is 'empirical reality', of experience. " The universe begins to look more like a great thought than a great machine. " —James Jeans Anomalous phenomena such as ESP and psychokinesis, collective consciousness, and synchronicity that are considered impossible in the context of the classical paradigm, fit naturally in, and can in turn provide evidence for the Quantum Paradigm. Spirituality and