Must Nature's Behavior Be Limited by the Present (1999) Understanding of Physicists?

Carsten Reese

For nearly 100 years, physicists have been trying to „understand“ quantum physics. Up to today no satisfying answer could be given concerning the surprising behavior of nature, especially if looking into microscopic scales. This article identifies an approach towards an answer to the questions arising from the quantum physics effects, which are preposterous to common sense, by first going one-step back: “understanding” as a terminus is defined, as well as the terms analogy, model, concept and theory. In addition, the role of mathematics for the understanding of physics is addressed. This generates a more accurate basis. The limitations of our mind and senses due to the fact that we are living in a mesoscopic world are taken into account. This may lead to an identification of our limits of insight. As an outcome, models may have to be replaced by concepts to achieve a different level of understanding compared to the “classical” expectation.

Andrea Gawrylewski

Mark G. Kuzyk

It is regrettable that the quantum length of an object is rarely if ever discussed, because it provides an ideal pedagogical paradigm for understanding how a physicist uses classical intuition to define quantum properties and how such quantum properties behave as one would expect in the classical limit. It also provides for a way to understand many-particle states, and leads to interesting quantum behavior that challenges our intuition about measurement. This exercise parallels the ways in which theories are developed, giving the student a concrete example of the thought process involved.

Bruce R. Wheaton, Thomas S. Kuhn

For all practical purposes the wave theory of light is a certainty. This is the story of a radical change in humans' concept of light. In 1896 most physicists were convinced that light consisted of wave disturbances in a medium, the electromagnetic aether. The energy transported in radiation was thought to propagate spherically outward from its source and to spread out over successively larger volumes in space. Thirty years later, a remarkably different concept of light prevailed. Physicists then took seriously the evidence collected over the preceding two decades showing that the energy of radiation does not spread in space. Under certain conditions, light behaves like a stream of particles. Our subject is more than the story of a shift from one theoretical explanation of radiation to another. This reconsideration of the nature of light was a significant event in our scientific understanding of the world. To resolve the paradox that faced them, physicists rejected the venerable Platonic dictum that the microscopic realm recapitulates the macroscopic; that laws generalized from the behavior of objects in the perceivable world may be applied to the imperceivable one. By 1927 physicists had assigned to all forms of radiation a curious amalgam of wave and particle behavior. Waves spread energy over larger and larger volumes of space; particles do not. Reconciliation of these conflicting properties was possible only through appeal to an ontology that transcended mechanical incompatibility. Nature was declared to be only imperfectly rationalizable in terms of human experience with macroscopic interactions. The programmatic goal formulated in the seventeenth century to reduce all physical phenomena to consistent mechanical representations was here recognized to be unattainable.

Vincent Edward Smith