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Palgrave Macmillan UK eBooks

Economics and Physical Science

Stephen J. DeCanio

Published Jan 1, 2014• 0 citations
Publisher

Abstract

Modern physical science has moved a considerable distance from the deterministic materialism of the nineteenth century. Even then, the inclusion of fields (gravitational, magnetic, and electric) complemented the massy, solid atoms in making up the world-picture of physics. But in the twentieth century, science replaced the earlier ontology entirely. Quantum mechanics, the crowning achievement of modern physics, has re-opened ages-old questions about the nature of reality, causation, and the connection between consciousness and the external world. The fundamental ground of modern physics is at the epistemological level — what we can know about physical systems is basic, rather than an onto-logical account of the world as it ‘really is.’ These keywords were added by machine and not by the authors. This process is experimental and the keywords may be updated as the learning algorithm improves.

DOI
10.1057/9781137371935_4

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Modern physical science has moved a considerable distance from the deterministic materialism of the nineteenth century. Even then, the inclusion of fields (gravitational, magnetic, and electric) complemented the massy, solid atoms in making up the world-picture of physics. But in the twentieth century, science replaced the earlier ontology entirely. Quantum mechanics, the crowning achievement of modern physics, has re-opened ages-old questions about the nature of reality, causation, and the connection between consciousness and the external world. The fundamental ground of modern physics is at the epistemological level — what we can know about physical systems is basic, rather than an onto-logical account of the world as it ‘really is.’ These keywords were added by machine and not by the authors. This process is experimental and the keywords may be updated as the learning algorithm improves.
Throughout the 20 th century, quantum mechanics was celebrated as the ultimate proof that modern science is leaving behind deterministic mechanical materialism and admitted that it is dealing with non-material entities; moreover, the notion that our reality takes place through being observed opens up to a subjectivist denial of objective reality.Some quantum scientists themselves claimed that the only way to account for our entire universe is to presuppose a global external observer (i.e., God).The text rejects not only this direct theological solution but also the traditional "realist" stance which secretly relies on a divine dimension (the divine status of natural laws).It proposes a reading of the ontological implications of quantum physics which opens up the way for a consequent materialism, even if, from a traditional reading, this may appear to be an odd materialism without matter.
An outline is given of the interpretation of quantum mechanical expressions if one assumes that what is called Quantum Mechanics today, refers to an underlying reality as in Chap. 2 , even if many authors claim to have evidence to the contrary, as is usually brought forward. If there exists a sub-microscopic classical world of real things, is that the same classical world as the world of large things such as planets, rocks and people? How does the notion of probability enter into quantum mechanics? These keywords were added by machine and not by the authors. This process is experimental and the keywords may be updated as the learning algorithm improves.
Twentieth-Century Physics A century which has run less than a third of its course has already witnessed two great upheavals in physical science. These are associated with the words Relativity and Quanta, and have forced the physicist of to-day to view nature against a background of ideas which is very different from that of his nineteenth-century predecessor. The latter thought of nature as an assemblage of objects located in space and continually changing with the passage of time. It was something entirely detached from, and external to, himself; something which he could study and explore from a distance as the astronomer studies the surface of the sun through his telescope, or the explorer the desert from his aeroplane. He thought of the apparatus of his laboratory as the astronomer thinks of his telescope, or the explorer of his field-glass; it shewed him things which were there whether he looked at them or not, which had been there before the first man appeared on earth, and would still be there after the last man had been frozen to extinction. Finally he accepted a “common-sense” view of nature, believing that there was no great difference between appearance and reality; the possibility that things were not as they seemed might provide an admirable subject for a debating society of philosophers, but was of as little practical concern to the scientist as to the farm-labourer. Although he may not have realised it, this complex of beliefs constituted a philosophical creed in itself.
Abstract A scientist in the late nineteenth century could be forgiven for thinking that the major elements of physics were built on unshakeable foundations and effectively established for all time. The inspirational work of Galileo Galilei and Isaac Newton in the seventeenth century had been shaped by a further 200 years of theoretical and, in particular, experimental science into a marvellous construction which we now call classical physics. This physics appeared to explain almost every aspect of the physical world: the dynamics of moving objects, thermodynamics, optics, electricity, magnetism, gravitation, etc. So closely did theory agree with and explain experimental observations of the everyday world that there could be no doubt about its basic correctness- its essential ‘truth’. Admittedly, there were a few remaining problems but these seemed to be trivial compared with the fundamentals - a matter of dotting a few is and crossing some ts.
Ever since Newton, two forms of influence or causation have vied for supremacy in physicist’s theories. Descartes and his followers thought local or contiguous action — material particles colliding and rebounding, for example — the essence of mechanical explanation; Newton evoked their wrath by advancing a form of action at a distance. In the 19th and 20th centuries, Maxwell and Einstein restored the local picture in their continuum theories of electromagnetism and gravity, and the cycle seemed to have come to an end — until Bell proved his theorem in 1964. These keywords were added by machine and not by the authors. This process is experimental and the keywords may be updated as the learning algorithm improves.
Along with weaving together observations, experiments, and theoretical constructs into a coherent mesh of understanding of the world around us, physics over its past five centuries has continuously refined the base concepts on which the whole framework is built. In quantum physics, first in non-relativistic mechanics and later in quantum field theories, even familiar concepts of position, momentum, wave or particle, are derived constructs from the classical limit in which we live but not intrinsic to the underlying physics. Most crucially, the very idea of the individual, whether an object or an event, distinguished only in a mere label of identity from others identical to it in all the physics, exists only as an approximation, not an element of underlying reality. Failure to recognize this and seeking alternative explanations in many worlds or multiverses leads only to incoherent logic and incorrect physics. As an example, in a physical system such as an atom in a particular state, physics deals with the universal system of all such atoms but makes no meaningful prediction of the position of an electron or the time of decay of any specific atom. Those are incidental, entirely random among all possible positions and times, even while physics makes very precise predictions for the distribution of the outcomes in measurements on atoms in that state. Physics deals with the universal, not the individual.