The classical science considered itself as the standard-bearer of common sense. A no-classical science, on the contrary, underlined broke off with it. The modern post-no classical science dialectically comes back to common sense, owing to synergetic, and also – to new achievements in the quantum physics and cosmology. On this base are resolved paradoxes of sphere of the becoming, which have resulted XX-century physicists on a way of subjectivity. Including, a sensible explanation receive not local effects in various areas (a quantum entangled, universal gravitation), an invari-ance of speed of light in vacuum and many other things. Of quantum area the new physics explains uncertainty of a condition of quantum object and the raised role of the device as typical display of «super sensitivity» of any system to influence in «area of jokers». The origin of the Universe is understood now not as the «Big Bang» which has been not understood for common sense, but as the «Big Boiling» – natural process of phase transition primary vacuum environments in system of material structures. The sensible explanation receives an anthrop principle, which was mystified in a no-classical science.Excess of speed of light by light self at its movement through the non-equilibrium environment naturally speaks that: this environment does not spend an entering impulse, and itself radiates a similar impulse from the opposite party. Not local there is only a process of self-organizing of the active environment. Understood becomes also quantum non-locality, including teleportation. Not local character of universal gravitation speaks the same basic basis, and waves of gravitation have no to it the direct attitude. All these explanations are reached without the contradiction with the relativistic theory, quantum physics and other achievements of a science of the last, no-classical stage of its development.
The classical science considered itself as the standard-bearer of common sense. A no-classical science, on the contrary, underlined broke off with it. The modern post-no classical science dialectically comes back to common sense, owing to synergetic, and also – to new achievements in the quantum physics and cosmology. On this base are resolved paradoxes of sphere of the becoming, which have resulted XX-century physicists on a way of subjectivity. Including, a sensible explanation receive not local effects in various areas (a quantum entangled, universal gravitation), an invari-ance of speed of light in vacuum and many other things. Of quantum area the new physics explains uncertainty of a condition of quantum object and the raised role of the device as typical display of «super sensitivity» of any system to influence in «area of jokers». The origin of the Universe is understood now not as the «Big Bang» which has been not understood for common sense, but as the «Big Boiling» – natural process of phase transition primary vacuum environments in system of material structures. The sensible explanation receives an anthrop principle, which was mystified in a no-classical science.Excess of speed of light by light self at its movement through the non-equilibrium environment naturally speaks that: this environment does not spend an entering impulse, and itself radiates a similar impulse from the opposite party. Not local there is only a process of self-organizing of the active environment. Understood becomes also quantum non-locality, including teleportation. Not local character of universal gravitation speaks the same basic basis, and waves of gravitation have no to it the direct attitude. All these explanations are reached without the contradiction with the relativistic theory, quantum physics and other achievements of a science of the last, no-classical stage of its development.
The findings of physics at the beginning of the last century have caused a revolutionary change in our commonly accepted view of the world. Because of their seemingly paradoxical features the philosophical consequences of the new insights, however, were never really adopted by the scientific community despite the quite apparent and far-reaching technical innovations they enabled. The new so-called „quantum“ physics revealed that the world at its foundation is no longer the familiar, tangible (thing-like) reality but rather a holistic immaterial „gestalt“: pure „interconnectedness“, inseparable „potentiality“. Its evolution in time does not follow from strictly determined laws but is only guided by certain inherent tendencies exhibited in terms of definite probabilities for possible material-energetic realizations. Generally these realizations recover the appearance of the familiar classical world as an objective reality with rigorous dynamic laws. In contrast to the old world view, where matter, consisting of discrete, constant building blocks, ranks first, and its various forms result secondarily from different law-determined arrangements of these building blocks, the situation in the modern view is turned around: Relationship or „gestalt“ or „information“ is now more fundamental and substance or matter/energy appears subsequently as an as-if phenomenon on the macroscopic level. The new world view sets limits to knowledge and the related science on principle. It proves to be very powerful because it establishes bridges between all disciplines and hitherto conflicting paradigms and descriptions. In particular in this more open framework the non-living and living phenomena (including the human species) no longer appear as basically different, but as two different structures of the same immaterial essence, relating respectively to static stable and static instable (highly sensitive), but dynamically stabilised (homeostatic) configurations. In such a „basically alive“ world biology and medicine, therefore, have to accept that logistically the immaterial, information-type (“spiritual“) software in the background becomes more important than the (physical) hardware being guided by it. The well-known difficulty of complementary medicine – and in particular of homeopathy with its impressive healing record – to explain its experience in the language of the old science, based on substances and a mechanistic dynamic, may thus be resolved within the more open and flexible framework of modern „science“, in which knowledge has a more open meaning (due to basic indeterminism) offering many more dimensions for healing to the devoted healer. The observation of a highly diversified filigree crystalline structure of (liquid) water, as demonstrated by recent studies, may represent a material/energetic print-out of the hidden information coded in the basic immaterial software.
By the end of the nineteenth century all the important elements of classical physics were fully mature. Newton's Laws had been applied with success to everything from industrial machines to planetary orbits. Classical thermodynamics had extended energy conservation arguments into thermal processes, and scientists including J. Willard Gibbs and Ludwig Boltzmann had developed the statistical interpretation of entropy. James Clerk Maxwell had explained all electromagnetic phenomena, from AC generators/motors to light, with the four Maxwell's equations and three material-dependent constitutive relations. There was serious discussion that physics was on the verge of being “finished” – becoming a closed system of knowledge like classical geometry with only essentially routine tasks left of determining how the known laws could be applied to engineering problems. Yet by 1930 the foundations of mechanics, electromagnetics, and atomic-scale systems had been shaken to the core by the new revolutions in the Theory of Relativity, the photon picture of light, and quantum physics. We are still reaping the benefits of the application of these new scientific paradigms in our technology today, including semiconductor electronic devices, lasers, and GPS systems. But the description of reality that these theories provide is still deeply anti-intuitive and disturbing. Nevertheless, quantum physics is one of the most extensively experimentally verified theories that we know. Even when quantum theory and common sense seem to diverge, quantum theory gives the right answers when tested by experiment. In the next chapter we will develop the framework of quantum theory that has been so successful when people “shut up and calculate,” as one scientist suggested as the way through the philosophical thicket of quantum physics. But in this chapter, we will spend a brief time considering the historical development and continuing paradoxical implications of quantum theory. The photoelectric effect and photons In 1905, Albert Einstein, who was a key figure in the revolution of modern physics, was working as a clerk in the patent office in Zurich, Switzerland. Einstein had finished his studies in physics, but had not obtained a coveted position as a university professor. He was intensely interested in the latest developments in classical physics and was aware of a few of the remaining loose ends that were resisting explanation in the classical model.
QUANTUM COSMOLOGY It is an honor, of course, but also a pleasure for me to join in this celebration of Murray Gell-Mann's sixtieth birthday and to address such a distinguished audience. Murray was my teacher and more recently we have worked together in the search for a quantum framework within which to erect a fundamental description of the universe which would encompass all scales – from the microscopic scales of the elementary particle interactions to the most distant reaches of the realm of the galaxies – from the moment of the big bang to the most distant future that one can contemplate. Such a framework is needed if we accept, as we have every reason to, that at a basic level the laws of physics are quantum mechanical. Further, as I shall argue below, there are important features of our observations which require such a framework for their explanation. This application of quantum physics to the universe as a whole has come to be called the subject of quantum cosmology. The assignment of the organizers was to speak on the topic “Where are our efforts leading?” I took this as an invitation to speculate, for I think that it is characteristic of the frontier areas of science that, while we may know what direction we are headed, we seldom know where we will wind up.
Today, many concepts from the dictionaries of academic psychology have entered the language of everyday communication. Perhaps the most common are the concepts of «subjective» and «objective». In many textbooks of psychology, «objective» is understood as something that belongs to the object itself, something that does not depend on the subject. The objective is opposed to the subjective-personal. Experimental research in the field of quantum physics questioned the division of the world into an impartial «objective reality» and its «subjective» (not impartial, biased) reflection, which provoked a crisis in this field of knowledge and the methodology of science as a whole. The main methodological problems of psychology are the question of the place of the mental in nature; on the relationship of mental and material phenomena, on the possibilities of human cognition - questions that also arose in the depths of quantum physics and were predetermined by the internal logic of their development. An excursion into quantum physics was necessary, firstly, for a deep understanding that reality is given to us in our sensations, perceptions, ideas and mental constructs (this was evidenced by the so-called «double slit experiment» and its interpretations) and we cannot say anything about reality as it is «in itself»; secondly, the realization that the foundations on which our knowledge is built differ from those in quantum physics. Currently, there is a dichotomy between material (physical) and conceptual reality. Thus, the principle of locality, which professes ordinary consciousness and according to which specific objects occupy a specific place in time and space, contradicts the principle of non-locality, according to which isolated systems do not exist at all and every particle of the universe is in «instantaneous» communication with all other particles. The world is created from the same quantum substance and it is impossible to say that one is the cause of the other. (This statement implies, in particular, a rethinking of the «principle of determinism» which requires the establishment of unambiguous causal relationships). The reality in which we live is not quantum, our language and stereotypes of thinking do not correspond to the nature of the phenomena described by quantum physics. It is about the deep properties of matter. Personally, I got the impression that the deeper you plunge into the world of atomic and subatomic, the more the outlines of the specific, material world familiar to us become blurred and the thinner the line between the physical and conceptual world, between the material and the spiritual becomes. The purpose of this article is to define the concepts of "objective" and "subjective" based on the analysis of achievements in quantum physics in the context of psychology.
Decoherentism, as being developed by many outstanding contemporary physicists, and elaborated in a systematic form by French physicist Roland Omnčs, eliminates eventually the long-lasting quantum-classical dualism in physics. It proves that in consequence of decoherence effect, the laws of quantum mechanics (with their probabilistic character) turn into the deterministic laws of classical physics; it describes therewith a real process through which the phenomenal world as given immediately to our sensory perception arises from quantum fundamentals; accordingly, classical determinism is a direct and controlled consequence of quantum mechanics.At the same time, decoherentism elaborated quantum logic (which is based on Griffiths' notion of consistent histories and corresponds to quantum mechanics) and proves that when decoherence acts, classical logic becomes a special kind of quantum logic. Since classical logic is essentially a learned version of common sense, the decoherentistic approach shows that the validity of common sense has its foundation in the rules of quantum mechanics. Thus, decoherentism eliminates the conflicts between quantum theory and common sense (in doing so, it proves that the famous paradoxes of Schrödinger's cat and the wave function reduction as well as the EPR paradox came from the mistake of having no account of decoherence effect).Nevertheless, decoherentism admits that the logic of common sense and as well as determinism itself have some probability of error which can be estimated in principle. These probabilities are most often extremely small and the corresponding errors have no practical consequence.Contrary to both classical and pre-decoherentistic quantum dynamics, decoherentism implies that the logical structure of quantum mechanics must select a definite direction of time, which necessarily coincides with the one occurring in thermodynamics; this means that the 2. law of thermodynamics (together with the irreversibility of time finds its basis in the decoherentistic interpretation of quantum mechanics.Hence it follows that decoherentism is truly a scientific revolution because the former principles (such as the principle of quantum-classical correspondence) turns in its frame into ordinary laws whic are derived from more fundamental principles.Considering the fact that classical determinism is a necessary presupposition for all scientific experiments, decoherentism's ability to derive determinism from newly interpreted quantum mechanics enables us to characterise it with the metaphor of "serpent gnawing his own tail." This means that quantum mechanics (in its decoherentistic interpretation) is able to explain even its own basic presuppositions; or, in other words, the results of the development of physical science turns back in order to explain its starting point. This important advancement makes physics structurally analogous to Adam Smith's economics (and to its metaphysical transcriptions in Hegel's Logic), to evolutionary biology and other sciences dealing with spontaneous order and self-organisation.