In the controversy on the philosophical foundations of quantum mechanics Whitehead's philosophy of organism has an essential place. But its realistic position invalidates any attempt to relate it to the School of Copenhagen's “orthodox interpretation”. Unlike, the Eurhythmic Physics developed by the Lisbon School has notable theoretical tunings with Whitehead's philosophy. In both, the notion of passive matter disappears; entities are understood as ecstatic process of becoming arising from a continuum of potentialities; and they achieve physical persistence grace to a set of synergistic interactions among their own regimes of rhythmical activity. The principle of Eurhythmy proposed by Prof. Croca then appears as the hypothesis, in contemporary theoretical physics, corresponding to the organicist vision of a universe in a developmental process of realization of the abstract potentiality of all possible worlds: a universe that, as a living organism, should be described as guided by an immanent teleological principle.
In the controversy on the philosophical foundations of quantum mechanics Whitehead's philosophy of organism has an essential place. But its realistic position invalidates any attempt to relate it to the School of Copenhagen's “orthodox interpretation”. Unlike, the Eurhythmic Physics developed by the Lisbon School has notable theoretical tunings with Whitehead's philosophy. In both, the notion of passive matter disappears; entities are understood as ecstatic process of becoming arising from a continuum of potentialities; and they achieve physical persistence grace to a set of synergistic interactions among their own regimes of rhythmical activity. The principle of Eurhythmy proposed by Prof. Croca then appears as the hypothesis, in contemporary theoretical physics, corresponding to the organicist vision of a universe in a developmental process of realization of the abstract potentiality of all possible worlds: a universe that, as a living organism, should be described as guided by an immanent teleological principle.
In this article I intend to show that certain aspects of A.N. Whitehead's philosophy of organism and especially his epochal theory of time, as mainly exposed in his well-known work Process and Reality, can serve in clarify the underlying assumptions that shape nonstandard mathematical theories as such and also as metatheories of quantum mechanics. Concerning the latter issue, I point to an already significant research on nonstandard versions of quantum mechanics; two of these approaches are chosen to be critically presented in relation to the scope of this work. The main point of the paper is that, insofar as we can refer a nonstandard mathematical entity to a kind of axiomatical formalization essentially 'codifying' an underlying mental process indescribable as such by analytic means, we can possibly apply certain principles of Whitehead's metaphysical scheme focused on the key notion of process which is generally conceived as the becoming of actual entities. This is done in the sense of a unifying approach to provide an interpretation of nonstandard mathematical theories as such and also, in their metatheoretical status, as a formalization of the empirical-experimental context of quantum mechanics.
There are deep similarities between Whitehead's idea of the process by which nature unfolds and the ideas of quantum theory. Whitehead says that the world is made of `actual occasions', each of which arises from potentialities created by prior actual occasions. These actual occasions are `happenings' modelled on experiential events, each of which comes into being and then perishes, only to be replaced by a successor. It is these experience-like `happenings' that are the basic realities of nature, according to Whitehead, not the persisting physical particles that Newtonian physics took be the basic entities. Similarly, Heisenberg says that what is really happening in a quantum process is the emergence of an `actual' from potentialities created by prior actualities. In the orthodox Copenhagen interpretation of quantum theory the actual things to which the theory refer are increments in `our knowledge'. These increments are experiential events. The particles of classical physics lose thei...
In his book, Nature Loves to Hide, Shimon Malin provides a wonderfully lucid and fascinating account of the development of quantum mechanics in the twentieth century and argues that the baffling puzzles of the quantum world can be understood in terms of Whitehead's process metaphysics. 1 Malin thus joins an ever-growing number of physicists who see in Whitehead's theories a useful framework for understanding contemporary physics, including for example, Henry Stapp, Timothy Eastman, Lawrence Fagg, Basil Hiley and David Finkelstein.Nature Loves to Hide is divided into three parts: "e Quandary," "From a Universe of Objects to a Universe of Experiences," and "Physics and the One."Malin also includes three appendices on the relativity of simultaneity, the proof of Bell's inequalities, and interpretations of quantum theory (i.e., quantum ontologies)."e Quandary" examines the debate between Niels Bohr and Albert Einstein regarding the completeness of quantum mechanics.Einstein believed that quantum mechanics violates both local realism and determinism and therefore fails as a complete, fundamental theory of nature while Bohr held that quantum mechanics was complete regardless of its violations.Bohr's radical thesis was that a single model cannot adequately describe the atomic and subatomic realms.His complementarity framework of wave/particle applies to different conditions, but even here Bohr is not describing nature itself, but rather what we can know about nature.Malin distinguishes between Einstein's ontic approach and Bohr's epistemic approach (39).e latter, which became the orthodox "Copenhagen Interpretation," is often described as pragmatic or instrumentalist since quantum theory is to be viewed as merely a set of rules for calculating correlations among observations.As the Einstein-Bohr controversy continued through their disciples, John Bell demonstrated in 1964 that the issue was not merely philosophical but rather scientific when his theorem led to an experiment that proved nature violates local realism.At this round, Bohr wins, Einstein loses.Malin understands "the quandary" to be the fact that local realism must be abandoned even if it is the "eminently reasonable" world-view to which we continue to cling.Physics (post Bell's theorem) has suffered a type of "schizophrenia" since physicists adhere to Bohr's view as the orthodox interpretation of quantum mechanics, yet, at the same time, rely on Einstein's paradigm at some fundamental level.Malin's
One of the virtues which Whitehead claims for his philosophy of organism is that it provides a conceptual framework for quantum theory (SMW chapter 8, PR 121-2 and 145).1 The theory which he has in mind is the 'old' quantum theory, consisting of the hypotheses of Planck (1901) and of Einstein (1905) that electromagnetic energy is emitted and absorbed in quanta, together with Bohr's model of the atom (1913) in which discontinuous transitions were supposed to occur between discrete electronic orbits. The philosophy of organism was presented in a preliminary form in the Lowell Lectures of 1925 (published in the same year as SMW) and in its most systematic form in the Gifford Lectures of 1927-8 (published as PR in 1929). It was during the years 1924-28 that De Broglie, Schr6dinger, Heisenberg, Born, Jordan, Bohr, Dirac, and others developed the 'new' quantum theory, which was more systematic than the old, much more successful in its predictions, and more revolutionary in its departures from classical physics. Whitehead never refers to the new quantum theory,2 and it would be unreasonable to expect that even so imaginative a philosopher and scientist could have anticipated it except in the most general terms. Nevertheless, it is important in evaluating the philosophy of organism to determine how well its physical implications agree with quantum theory and with contemporary microphysical theory in general. To do this is the primary purpose of the present essay. It will appear that the agreement is only partial and that there are several crucial discrepancies both in detailed predictions and in general spirit.
This paper re-opens the debate on the failure of quantum mechanics to provide an understandable view of micro-reality. A critique is offered of the commonly accepted ‘Copenhagen Interpretation’ of a theory that is only a mathematical approach to the level of reality characterized by atoms and electrons. This critique is based on the oldest approach to thinking about nature for over 2500 years, known as Natural Philosophy. Quantum mechanics (QM) was developed over the first quarter of the 20th Century, when scientists were enthralled by a new philosophy known as Positivism, whose foundations were based on the assumption that material objects exist only when measured by humans – This central assumption conflates epistemology (knowledge) with ontology (existence). The present critique rejects this human-centered view of reality by assuming material reality has existed long before (and will persist long after) human beings (“Realism”). The defensive view that the micro-world is too different to understand using regular thinking (and only a mathematical approach is possible) is rejected totally. At least 12 earlier QM interpretations are critically analyzed, indicating the broad interest in “what does QM mean?” The standard theory of quantum mechanics is thus constructed on only how the micro-world appears to macro measurements - as such, it cannot offer any view of how the foundations of the world are acting when humans are not observing it - this has generated almost 100 years of confusion and contradiction at the very heart of physics. Significantly, we live in a world that is not being measured by scientists but is interacting with itself and with us. QM has failed to provide explanations: only recipes (meaningless equations), not insights. Physics has returned to the pre-Newtonian world of Ptolemaic phenomenology: only verifiable numbers without real understanding. The focus needs to be on an explicit linkage between the micro-world, when left to itself, and our mental models of this sphere of material reality, via the mechanism of measurement. This limits the role of measurement to confirming our mental models of reality but never confusing these with a direct image of ‘the thing in itself’. This implies a deep divide between reality and appearances. This paper proposes that it is the attempt to preserve continuum mathematics (especially calculus), which drives much of the mystery and confusion behind all attempts to understand quantum mechanics. The introduction of discrete mathematics is proposed to help analyze the discrete interactions between the quintessential quantum objects: the electrons and their novel properties. Additionally, several hidden major assumptions have been present in Classical Mechanics (represented by continuum mathematics) since its inception by Newton that are blocking progress and understanding of quantum mechanics. A related paper demonstrates that it is possible to create a point-particle theory of electrons that explains all their peculiar (and ‘paradoxical’) behavior without introducing the continuum mathematical ideas of fields or waves. * Surrey, B.C. Canada (604) 542-2299 spsi99@telus.net Version 1.195 10-07-2016 Begun 23-06-2008 {pp. 80, 70.4 Kw; 800 KB}
INTRODUCTION One of the virtues which Whitehead claims for his philosophy of organism is that it provides a conceptual framework for quantum theory ( SMW chapter 8, PR 121–2 and 145). The theory which he has in mind is the ‘old’ quantum theory, consisting of the hypotheses of Planck (1901) and of Einstein (1905) that electromagnetic energy is emitted and absorbed in quanta, together with Bohr's model of the atom (1913) in which discontinuous transitions were supposed to occur between discrete electronic orbits. The philosophy of organism was presented in a preliminary form in the Lowell Lectures of 1925 (published in the same year as SMW ) and in its most systematic form in the Gifford Lectures of 1927–28 (published as PR in 1929). It was during the years 1924–28 that de Broglie, Schrödinger, Heisenberg, Born, Jordan, Bohr, Dirac, and others developed the ‘new’ quantum theory, which was more systematic than the old, much more successful in its predictions, and more revolutionary in its departures from classical physics. Whitehead never refers to the new quantum theory, and it would be unreasonable to expect that even so imaginative a philosopher and scientist could have anticipated it except in the most general terms. Nevertheless, it is important in evaluating the philosophy of organism to determine how well its physical implications agree with quantum theory and with contemporary microphysical theory in general. To do this is the primary purpose of the present essay.