Experimental philosophies

Anin Holden

A physicist's view of the universe is largely derived from Aristotle's natural philosophy of seeking the patterns observed in nature. This view has matured over the years through the development of quantitative experimentation and the mathematical formulation of theories. However, one part of natural philosophy that has remained the province of philosophy, rather than science, is the nature of observation itself: what is the meaning of our awareness, our sensations, and ourselves?

David Wick

S. J. Freedman

My 1972 Berkeley dissertation describes the experimental test of local hidden variable theories that was reported in Physical Review Letters that year (S. J. Freedman and J. F. Clauser, PRL28, 938 (1972)). I will give a personal account of how a young graduate student who had originally planned to do philosophy, then engineering, then theoretical physics wound up with the problem of testing quantum mechanics and fell in love with experimental physics. I will also describe, from my perspective, what was going on and what we were thinking. Article not available.

Phyllis Chiasson

Bartłomiej Błesznowski, Cezary Rudnicki, Michelle Granas

Osvaldo Frota Pessoa Junior

The term “experimental philosophy” has been used to refer to the solution of what were considered philosophical problems by means of laboratory experiments. A recent example of this was the experimental violation of the Bell inequality, which ruled out certain philosophically appealing “realist local” theories as alternatives to quantum mechanics (QM). Following the spirit of such experimental philosophy, this paper proposes a feasible test between two different interpretations concerning the nature of “mixtures” in QM. The use of delayed coincidence techniques seems to show that the process of mixing beams of light in different polarizations is reversible, favoring a weak version of the so-called “ignorance interpretation” over the “instrumentalist” view.