The last century has been a period of extreme interest for scientific research, marked by the overcoming of the classical frontiers of scientific knowledge.Research oriented towards the infinitely small and infinitely big, in both cases beyondthe borders of the visible. Quantum physics has led to a new Copernican revolution,opening the way to new questions that have led to a new view of reality. At the sametime, new theories have developed, involving every field of science, philosophy and art, rediscovering the link between unity and totality and the importance of humanpotential. In a transdisciplinary approach we consider quantum field theory, new ideason the concepts of vacuum and entanglement, metaphysical aspects of quantum revolution and the introduction of different interpretative approaches on the “Whole”.
The last century has been a period of extreme interest for scientific research, marked by the overcoming of the classical frontiers of scientific knowledge.Research oriented towards the infinitely small and infinitely big, in both cases beyondthe borders of the visible. Quantum physics has led to a new Copernican revolution,opening the way to new questions that have led to a new view of reality. At the sametime, new theories have developed, involving every field of science, philosophy and art, rediscovering the link between unity and totality and the importance of humanpotential. In a transdisciplinary approach we consider quantum field theory, new ideason the concepts of vacuum and entanglement, metaphysical aspects of quantum revolution and the introduction of different interpretative approaches on the “Whole”.
Quantum physics, emerging from the intellectual crisis of classical mechanics at the dawn of the twentieth century, has over the course of twelve decades established itself as the most foundationally disruptive, experimentally verified, and technologically generative scientific framework in the history of human inquiry. This article presents a synthetic, balanced account of quantum physics across three temporal dimensions — its historical origins and theoretical maturation, its present theoretical frontiers and technological applications, and its future prospects across computing, communication, sensing, and the search for a unified theory of physical reality. Drawing upon foundational primary literature, historiographical scholarship, experimental physics, and contemporary quantum technology research, the article traces the discipline's evolution from Planck's quantum hypothesis of 1900 through the quantum mechanical revolution of the 1920s, the development of quantum field theory and the Standard Model, and the emergence of a second quantum revolution deliberately harnessing entanglement and superposition as technological resources. The analysis identifies three domains of outstanding significance for quantum physics in the present century: the unresolved interpretational and foundational questions surrounding the measurement problem and the nature of quantum reality; the technological race toward fault-tolerant quantum computing and global quantum communication networks; and the deep theoretical challenge of reconciling quantum mechanics with general relativity in a unified framework capable of describing physical reality at all scales. The article concludes that quantum physics remains an unfinished revolution whose most consequential theoretical discoveries and technological applications may lie not behind but ahead of us, and that understanding its past, present, and future is essential for any serious engagement with the scientific and technological landscape of the twenty-first century.
…the quantum theory of fields is the contemporary locus of metaphysical research. (Stein 1970, p. 285) It is now generally recognized that Quantum Field Theory (QFT), after many vicissitudes and a period of almost total neglect, has emerged during the last ten years as a triumphant framework in which to do elementary particle physics. If philosophers are prepared to use current physical theory as a guide to resolving metaphysical questions (and that is a big “If”), then QFT is what philosophers should all be studying. But the subject is notoriously.recondite, and philosophers are busy people, so the objective of the present paper is to cut through all technicalities and try to tell in as straightforward a way as possible just what QFT has to say about “reality”.
Nowadays modern physics is a highly formalized discipline. It is almost impossible to build a model of the whole reality because physical research requires too much specialization in local areas. Technical difficulties make harder the metaphysical analysis of the investigation. But physics is a powerful path to the very fundamental ontology. Quantum physics developed in the XX century has discovered new physical phenomena that demand a new revision of the classical ontological sets. Actually quantum physics continues improving its potential. In fact there are some heuristic theories that use quantum physics to operate in some research fields of classical human sciences. Certainly our old fashioned model of reality must be open to the last theories of modern physics. We should prepare for developing the new scientificoriented humanism. In this paper we offer seven metaphysical derivations of quantum physics.
The turn of the XXth century witnessed a revolution in physics comparable to Isaac Newton’s discovery of the universal laws of mechanics and of gravitation three centuries earlier. The world required to be described in novel terms, as the immutable, deterministic view of our familiar universe had given way to a new world picture, one which featured chance, flux, and an incessant upsurge of waves of matter. Such a worldview was so radically new and counterintuitive that it gave rise to strong debates, to the effect that Albert Einstein himself tried to oppose it on the grounds that “God does not play dice”. In spite of the intense debates that accompanied its emergence, quantum mechanics quickly proved an incredibly efficacious new tool to understand and to predict a wide array of new phenomena. It was so successful that in no time it broke free from the environment of research labs to become part of daily life, making it possible, for example, to understand why some materials were conductors, while others were insulators. Along with it, came, too, the discovery of transistors, on which much of modern electronics rests. It also led to understand how novel materials known as superconductors allow the transport of electricity with no loss, thus paving the way for new developments in the fields of medical imagery or energy distribution. Other aspects of the quantum theory led to the development of atomic clocks of astounding accuracy, which would be wrong by no more than fifteen seconds, had they been set at the beginning of the universe. A hundred years later, at the turn of the XXIst century, Quantum mechanics has lost none of its astounding power. Contemporary research has undertaken the task of exploring its less immediately perceptible aspects. Groundbreaking developments have ensued, such as the teleportation of grains of light or the possibility, once predicted by the great physicist Richard Feynman, to build, one day, novel computers which, unlike the ones we are familiar with today, will be able to process innumerable numbers of operations in parallel. The Wright Colloquium will be for us the occasion to explore, in the company of five internationallyknown specialists in the field, some of the fascinating aspects of quantum mechanics. We will appraise how efficiently quantum physics can describe our world, and confront its limitation when it is faced with the infinitely small (in relation to recent experiments carried out at the CERN) as with the incommensurably large scale of sidereal spaces. We will appreciate the extent to which quantum physics already has impacted our everyday lives, and evoke the way in which novel fields such as quantum computers and quantum information will entail profound changes in the future. The quantum adventure has only just begun! Monday 15 November 2010 - 18h30 Jochen Mannhart Center for Electronic Correlations and Magnetism, University of Augsburg, Germany Quantum Physics on the Scale of Daily Life Tuesday 16 November 2010 - 18h30 Wolfgang Ketterle Nobel Laureate 2001 (Physics), Department of Physics, Massachusetts Institute of Technology, Cambridge, U.S.A. When freezing cold is not cold enough New forms of matter close to absolute zero temperature Wednesday 17 November 2010 - 18h30 David Gross Nobel Laureate 2004 (Physics), Kavli Institute for Theoretical Physics, University of California, Santa-Barbara, U.S.A. Quantum Mechanics of the Very, Very Small and the Very, Very Large Thursday 18 November 2010 - 18h30 Alain Aspect CNRS senior scientist and Professor Institut d'Optique and Ecole Polytechnique Palaiseau, France. From Einstein’s intuition to quantum bits: a new quantum age? Vendredi 19 novembre 2010 - 18h30 Rainer Blatt Institute of Quantum Optics and Quantum Information, Austrian Academy of Sciences and University of Innsbruck, Austria The Quantum Way of Doing Computations
The first decades of the twentieth century were marked by two revolutionary scientific accomplishments, the theory of relativity and quantum mechanics, with repercussions still felt today. Relativity theory and quantum mechanics became the two most important branches of “Modern Physics” that emerged as an alternative to “Classical Physics” (a term often used interchangeably with that of “Newtonian” or “Galilean” physics). No field of science (from astronomy to the life sciences), no field of knowledge (from philosophy to sociology), and no artistic practice (from architecture to the fine arts) was left untouched by these investigations into the nature of our physical universe.
The article is devoted to the analysis of the origins of the second quantum technological revolution associated with the transmission and processing of quantum information. The objective of the study is to describe how radical restructuring of the foundations of quantum physics in the first quarter of the XX century led to the creation of technological innovations in the early XXI century. The first part of the paper clarifies the notions of scientific innovations and revolutionary transformations in science, and characterizes the main differences between quantum mechanics and classical physics. The second part argues that the second quantum revolution was prepared in the process of experimental verification of different views on the reality of the objects of quantum theory and the ways of their cognition.