The Quantum-Mechanical View of Nature(Series on Scientific View of Nature)

Narendra D. Sharma

The nature of cause and effect was scientifically explained by Isaac Newton during late seventeenth century. It was a classical mechanistic view. These ideas went through some changes with the evolution of quantum mechanics during twentieth century. However, Sage Kanada had scientifically discussed the nature of ‘Cause and Effect’ in his ‘Vaisesika Sutras’ more than two thousand years ago. This article will deliberate on the thoughts expressed by Sage Kanada which account for both classical and quantum views and then discusses their correlation with modern scientific ideas.

Clifford Alan Hooker

Valia Allori

Scientific realism is the view that our best scientific theories can be regarded as (approximately) true. This is connected with the view that science, physics in particular, and metaphysics could (and should) inform one another: on the one hand, science tells us what the world is like, and on the other hand, metaphysical principles allow us to select between the various possible theories which are underdetermined by the data. Nonetheless, quantum mechanics has always been regarded as, at best, puzzling, if not contradictory. As such, it has been considered for a long time at odds with scientific realism, and thus a naturalized quantum metaphysics was deemed impossible. Luckily, now we have many quantum theories compatible with a realist interpretation. However, scientific realists assumed that the wave-function, regarded as the principal ingredient of quantum theories, had to represent a physical entity, and because of this they struggled with quantum superpositions. In this paper I discuss a particular approach which makes quantum mechanics compatible with scientific realism without doing that. In this approach, the wave-function does not represent matter which is instead represented by some spatio-temporal entity dubbed the primitive ontology: point-particles, continuous matter fields, space-time events. I argue how within this framework one develops a distinctive theory-construction schema, which allows to perform a more informed theory evaluation by analyzing the various ingredients of the approach and their inter-relations.

John J. Stachel

The traditional view is that a theory is a conceptual framework providing predictions, and the results of experiments or observations decide whether the theory is right or wrong. It will be contrasted with the modern view that one must incorporate the conditions of applicability of a concept into the very meaning of the concept (measurability analysis), and that only a series of theories (scientific research program) can be said to be scientific or unscientific. This modern view will be applied to a number of questions in quantum mechanics (what is quantization?, states vs processes, open vs closed systems) and quantum field theory (particles and field quanta, bosons vs fermions), and to the search for a theory of quantum gravity (background independent vs fixed background theories).