9. On Herstein’s ‘Quanta and Corpuscles’

William Band

Emilio d’Emilio, Luigi E. Picasso

Ronny Desmet

In this chapter Ronny Desmet airs some disagreements with Gary Herstein’s earlier chapter on ‘Quanta and Corpuscles’, arguing for a more nuanced understanding of Bohr’s Copenhagen interpretation. He also notes that concept of continuity can be reasonably easily understood as the divisibility-indivisibility contrast, and that Lewis Ford’s temporal atomism thesis is note definitively dead, since Whitehead did change his mind from an idea of continuous becoming to one of atomic becoming

Arthur Haas

Bryan. Priestman

It is the purpose of this paper to explain the fact that in the inter-atomic transfer of energy, whilst the quantitative aspect of the transfer seems to demand a corpuscular theory of energy, the qualitative aspect, (i.e. the path traken by the energy) seems to demand a wave theory. The suggested explanation may be summarised thus: hypothesis (i) During the transfer process corpuscles and electromagnetic waves both exist, but the energy resides solely in the corpuscles. Hypothesis (ii) The presence of the electromagnetic fieldinvolves a distortion of space-time, and the patbstaken by the corpuscles are determined by the condition that they must correspond to geodesics in this distorted spacetime. [...]