The four antinomies of Zeno of Elea, especially Achilles and the tortoise continue to be provoking issues which are even now not always satisfactory solved. Aristotle himself used this antinomy to develop his understanding of movement: it is a fluent continuum that has to be treated as a whole. The parts, if any, are only potentially present in the whole. And that is exactly what quantum mechanics is claiming: movement is quantized in contrast to classical mechanics. The objective of this study is to show the merits of the Aristotelian approach. It is a good candidate for serving as the philosophical background for understanding fundamental aspects of quantum mechanics. Especially mentioned are the influence of the final state in quantum mechanics that in philosophy could be correlated with the final cause. Like in the work of Aristotle also in this study examples from science are presented to illustrate the philosophical approach. But, in contrast to ancient Greek, the examples now relate to issues which are only fully accessible to the scientifically trained reader. As the main conclusion the dialogue between scientists and philosophers is strongly recommended which will result in progress in both disciplines.
The four antinomies of Zeno of Elea, especially Achilles and the tortoise continue to be provoking issues which are even now not always satisfactory solved. Aristotle himself used this antinomy to develop his understanding of movement: it is a fluent continuum that has to be treated as a whole. The parts, if any, are only potentially present in the whole. And that is exactly what quantum mechanics is claiming: movement is quantized in contrast to classical mechanics. The objective of this study is to show the merits of the Aristotelian approach. It is a good candidate for serving as the philosophical background for understanding fundamental aspects of quantum mechanics. Especially mentioned are the influence of the final state in quantum mechanics that in philosophy could be correlated with the final cause. Like in the work of Aristotle also in this study examples from science are presented to illustrate the philosophical approach. But, in contrast to ancient Greek, the examples now relate to issues which are only fully accessible to the scientifically trained reader. As the main conclusion the dialogue between scientists and philosophers is strongly recommended which will result in progress in both disciplines.
The four antinomies of Zeno of Elea continue to be provoking issues that remain relevant for the foundation of science. Aristotle used this antinomy to arrive at a deeper understanding of movement: it is a fluent continuum that he considers to be a whole. The parts, if any, are only potentially present. Similarly, quantum mechanics states that movement is quantized; things move or change in nonreducible steps, the so-called quanta. This view is in contrast to classical mechanics, where infinitesimally small steps are permitted. The objective of the present study is to show the merits of the Aristotelian approach. Examples from modern science serve to illustrate the philosophical statements.
The study of the motion of bodies is referred to as mechanics. The study of the motion of subatomic particles is involved in the field of quantum mechanics. The argument that quantum mechanics is the offspring of earlier mechanics continues to be supported by this body of study. To maintain this perspective, the work traces the origins of the study of mechanics back to Aristotle. This research was subsequently rethought and given a new orientation in modern Newtonian mechanics. It is demonstrated in this work, via the use of the philosophical mechanism of analysis, that the disintegration of these two mechanics resulted in the development of quantum mechanics. The study makes the key observation that, when Quantum mechanics is compared with the two earlier types of mechanics, the concepts of objectivity, causality, determinism, and certainty characteristic of the earlier types are rendered obsolete within the framework of Quantum physics. The discussion concludes with the thesis that, given the current state of scientific research, which enables the unification of all domains of knowledge, the combination of metaphysics and science in the pursuit of greater human understanding ought to create a new dimension of knowledge acquisition.
Although there are many different types of philosophy, many philosophers agree that the mainstream of Western philosophy (Socrates, Plato, Aristotle, Descartes, Kant, Wittgenstein) developed toward the perfection of Socrates’ absolutism. But can the absolutism maintain its central position after analytic philosophy? There are pessimistic views on this problem, such as that of R. Rorty, the standard-bearer of neo-pragmatism. Recently, I proposed quantum language (which is including quantum mechanics, statistics, fuzzy sets, etc.). I think that that this theory is not only one of the most fundamental scientific theories, but also the scientific final destination of Western philosophy. If so, Socrates’ dream has come true. The purpose of this paper is to discuss the above and to inform readers that quantum language has the power to create a paradigm shift from the classical mechanical world view to the quantum mechanical worldview.
Probably no theory in the history of science has produced such a profound cultural and scientific revolution as is determined by quantum mechanics. Founded around 1920 by illustrious physicists, all Nobel Prize winners, it has completely subverted the conception of matter and the universe. The theory that all matter is made up of atoms has already been formulated by Greek philosophers, starting with Democritus. Quantum mechanics provided a description based on a new conception of the elementary structure of atoms, and formulated the fundamental laws to which atoms obey. Quantum theory has obtained the unanimous and shared consent of the scientific world, although some aspects have not been definitively confirmed. Strengthened by the universal acceptance of his theories, quantum mechanics claims its intellectual primacy over all the other sciences, and the scientific world seems to grant it, so much so as to archive all the knowledge and achievements gathered in its thousand-year history. From the epistemological point of view all established theories are worthy of consideration and must be shared and accepted until proven groundless. Dating, quantum mechanics still enjoys the consent of many scientists, but this does not mean that it can claim to be the repository of all truth, based on an unacceptable and anti-scientific syllogism for which: A) all organic and inorganic matter is formed by atoms and molecules; B) quantum mechanics has founded theories and formulas to which atoms and molecules obey; C) accordingly quantum mechanics can control all universal matter. But the presumption of its predominance goes further than willing to dominate living matter. In this article we are going to examine with a sharp criticism, the aberrant and anti-scientific claim of this discipline to dominate not only science but also universal matter. We propose a more moderate and considered vision of the observable natural phenomena and consider them events in continuous evolution, and to adapt our hypotheses and theories with an equal evolutionary approach.
The article discusses the new approaches to the four Zeno’s Paradoxes: “The Arrow”, “The Achilles”, “The Dichotomy” and “The Moving Rows”. Paradoxes are analyzed in relation to the current research in the field of elementary particle Physics and promising areas of the quantum theory of gravity development. Provided with the necessary philosophical interpretation Physics concepts are used to clarify Zeno’s Paradoxes and to search for answers to them. The involvement of modern approaches is shown to be ineffective in solving the paradoxes due to their scope losses when analyzed by the microworld Physics on ultra-small scales. The work’s main part is devoted to demonstrating this circumstance – the questions posed by paradoxes are deprived of the possibility of getting the answers (at least, in their classical interpretation). As a possible explanation stands the ground of mixing the properties of the macroworld and the microworld in the paradoxes statements (which is historically justified given the intuitive homogeneity of big and small, and the origin of non-classical Physics – quantum mechanics – only in the 20th century), meaning the transition from observation of the large physical objects to the infinitely small in terms of discreteness and continuity. However, the principles of space organization on ultra-small scales are beginning to be clarified in general terms only now, and, perhaps, these principles may turn out to be quite far from classical ideas on fundamental physical reality.
Werner Heisenberg, Erwin Schr�odinger and Wolfgang Pauli exhibited in their works a strong and insistent interest in Greek philosophy. And this interest --they claimed-- was not at all separated from their investigations into the new quantum theory. Heisenberg directly a�rmed that "one could hardly make progress in modern atomic physics without a knowledge of Greek natural philosophy". What does this claim mean? Why do these central �gures in the development of quantum mechanics saw the Greeks as their main inspiring source? Why do they took them as a model for contemporary science, even over their modern predecessors of Enlightenment? This work attempts to answer these questions focusing on three main reasons: the revision of atomism, the recasting of the meaning of "understanding" in physics, and the critique of separations in science.