The article aims at presenting the relationship between science and philosophy based on the works of Werner Heisenberg. It deals with the infl uence of the scientifi c breakthrough on the understanding of physical concepts such as matter, time and causality. It also contains a discussion on the process of creating a new branch of science – quantum mechanics, and shows how the work and views of Heisenberg contributedto it. The relationship between physics and philosophy is presented here with particular emphasis on showing the results of research and philosophical refl ections on the concepts of matter, the philosophy of the language of science, the theory of unifi cation and the fl agship work of Heisenberg: the principle of uncertainty.
The article aims at presenting the relationship between science and philosophy based on the works of Werner Heisenberg. It deals with the infl uence of the scientifi c breakthrough on the understanding of physical concepts such as matter, time and causality. It also contains a discussion on the process of creating a new branch of science – quantum mechanics, and shows how the work and views of Heisenberg contributedto it. The relationship between physics and philosophy is presented here with particular emphasis on showing the results of research and philosophical refl ections on the concepts of matter, the philosophy of the language of science, the theory of unifi cation and the fl agship work of Heisenberg: the principle of uncertainty.
Although the scientific milieu of the first part of the 20th century is marked by the strong influence of neopositivism, prominent physicists such as Werner Heisenberg, Wolfgang Pauli and Niels Bohr stressed the necessity to transcend human sensorial cognition in quest for the ultimate sense of things and the source of the ethical values of human conduct. In particular, this comes to the fore in the context of the relations between science and religion. The stance of Werner Heisenberg in regards to this issue reveals his deep philosophical insight with emphasis on the role of the common sense language in the symbolic discourse of the traditional religions. The advent of the new scientific method in the 17th, that revolutionized the antique picture of the world, led to the final breakdown of the adequacy of the common sense language in the scientific description of the physical reality. According to Heisenberg, the relations between science and religion become most visible with the resulting loss of the symbolic religious discourse whereby access to the ethical values is hindered.
In the present article we analyze the understanding and the use of the Kantian philosophy by the German physicist Werner Heisenberg, Nobel Prize of Physics of 1932, formulator of the principle of uncertainty. Heisenberg seems to adopt a neo-Kantian understanding of the nature of science, according to which science would not deal with the real itself, but only with the way it appears, which inescapably depends on the interaction between the subject and the object of knowledge. However, in spite of this conception, Heisenberg considers that the Kantian definitions of "space", "time" and "causality" are not compatible with the developments of the quantum mechanics. In this opportunity we will see more carefully the conception of science and the problem of causality.
The article is devoted to the analysis of the concept of “reality” in the philosophical and scientific works of the theoretical physicist Werner Heisenberg. It analyzes the Heisenberg’s works on the philosophy of natural science, a significant part of which is devoted to quantum theory and its basic concepts. The author shows that Heisenberg’s thought was formed in parallel with the development of relevant problems among neo-Kantian philosophers (N. Hartmann, B. Nicolescu, etc.) throughout the 20th century. According to the author, many European researchers focus their attention on the scientific side of Heisenberg’s work, that is, on the analysis of his physical argumentation. The philosophical aspects of Heisenberg’s works are mostly studied by Russian philosophers of science. The intellectual vector of Heisenberg’s work was the idea of the need for a new philosophical thinking that goes beyond the scope of rational activity and requires a reconception of the gnoseological categories used as an instrument for the cognition of the reality. It relies on the phenomenological tradition, as well as on the arguments of J.W. von Goethe that theory cannot “capture” reality; it requires a synthesis of “trust in experience” and “intelligent observation” (discretion) to understand it. It is also demonstrated in the article the Heisenberg's attitude to the formation of the language of science and to the comparative studies of the philosophical systems of such thinkers as Plato, Democritus, Aristotle.
This article offers a new argument concerning the relationships between mathematics and physical reality in quantum theory. While, as dedicated to the centenary of Heisenberg's invention of quantum mechanics, the article contains a historical discussion, it is not historical, but physical and philosophical. Heisenberg's thinking leading him to QM and beyond is only part of the genealogy of this argument, which also differs from that of Heisenberg and builds on the previous work of the present author. Among the contributions in the article are a new conception of the ultimate reality responsible for quantum phenomena; a new understanding, based on this conception, of the role of mathematics in physics in quantum theory; a critique of Heisenberg's and all Platonism in quantum theory and beyond; a new perspective on the role of symmetries in quantum field theory; and a new understanding of the relationships between continuity and discontinuity in quantum physics.
In this paper we discuss the principles of two fundamental theories of physics: mechanics and quantum mechanics. First, we consider two philosophical positions of the German physicist Heinrich Hertz. He established one of the both in the introduction of his well known Principles of Mechanics. This view - Hertz's "picture" concept - which has a long tradition in philosophy, particularly with regard to physics and later to other empirical sciences, serves as the starting point of an interpretation of the relationship between real systems and theoretical structures of modern science using the concept of fuzziness. This "fuzzy view" on philosophy of science gives particularly an interpretation of Hertz's earlier lecture on The Constitution of matter. Second we consider some principles of quantum mechanics, particularly Werner Heisenberg's uncertainty relation of subatomic object's position and momentum, and Max Born's probabilistic interpretation of the quantum mechanical wave function. These principles are parts of the so-called Copenhagen interpretation of quantum mechanics. Third, we argue that the "fuzzy approach" is fruitful for a "fuzzy" interpretation of quantum mechanics because fuzziness fills the gap between systems and phenomena in reality and the scientific theory of quantum mechanics - as every other scientific theory.
The ideas in Heisenberg's paper on quantum mechanics in 1925 mark the beginning not only of a new phase in modern physics, but also of Heisenberg's own philosophical journey. This thesis examines that journey between 1925 and the late 1950s by situating Heisenberg's philosophy of quantum mechanics in the context of his encounters with his contemporaries as well as the context of various strands of thought in the German-speaking world at the time. Heisenberg's early philosophical critique of the 'classical' viewpoint between 1925 and 1927 bears the decisive influence of Einstein's theory of relativity, more specifically, the positivism he saw as underpinning Einstein's emancipation from Newtonian physics. The positivist influence on Heisenberg's early attitude to quantum mechanics is evident in three ways: (a) his invocation of an observability principle in 1925 to justify the renunciation of the concept of the electron orbit, (b) an instrumentalist conception of understanding, which characterised Heisenberg's response to Schrodinger's demand for classical visualisation in space and time in 1926-7, and (c) the introduction of an operational definition of concepts such as position and velocity in 1927, in an attempt to replace the concepts of classical physics. But after discussions with Bohr and Einstein in 1926-7, Heisenberg soon recognised what we might term his `empiricist' viewpoint was problematic. In 1927 Heisenberg's thought undergoes a shift away from the `empiricist' viewpoint that had underpinned his early philosophy of quantum mechanics. The nature and scope of this transformation, which forms the central theme in this thesis, has, up until now, been poorly understood and often completely neglected. Through his discussions with Bohr, Heisenberg came to the realisation that despite their limitations, classical concepts were conditions for the possibility of the description of all experience. This marked the abandonment of his earlier attempt to replace classical concepts with quantum concepts. The recognition of the primacy of classical language forms the point of departure for much of Heisenberg's later thought, which brought him into contact with the attempts in the German-speaking world in the 1920s to reconstruct Kantian epistemology. By the mid-1930s, Heisenberg advocated a 'pragmatic transformation' of Kantian philosophy, in which classical concepts were held to be a priori in the sense that they remained the conditions for the possibility of experience, but were no longer held to be necessary or universal in a strict Kantian sense. After 1940 Heisenberg saw the paradoxes of quantum mechanics under the aegis of what can be termed a 'transcendental conception of language', according to which language is not a mere tool, but actively shapes, gives form, and objectifies, our 'reality'. The limits of a classical 'description' in quantum mechanics therefore came to signify for Heisenberg, the limits of 'objective reality'. While Bohr exerted perhaps the most important philosophical influence on Heisenberg, their intellectual relationship was characterised by disagreement and misunderstanding. This is most strikingly displayed in their respective views on wave-particle duality and complementarily. While after 1927 Heisenberg accepted Bohr's basic insight that our knowledge of the quantum world is mediated through classical language, he did not share Rohr's interpretation of complementarity. While Heisenberg certainly used terms such as 'complementarity' and wave-particle duality' in his writings, a close reading reveals that these terms had very different meanings for the two physicists. This is particularly evident in the contrast between Heisenberg's notion of wave-particle equivalence and Bohr's idea of complementarity. In bringing to light these divergences between Bohr and Heisenberg, this thesis lends further weight to the view - already advocated by scholars such as John Hendry and Mara Beller - that the so-called Copenhagen interpretation of quantum mechanics should not be thought of as a unified philosophical position, but actually comprises a number of different strands.