Just an astounding conclusion to a series of theories that science will be eviscerating for decades.. But when He comes upon the clouds.. Then we shall know his truth.
The article aims to introduce quantum physics to beginners by embedding it in the broader context of the history of knowledge and Thomistic philosophy. It first discusses the gradual nature of individual and collective knowing, the role of tradition, and the limits of the human intellect as articulated by Thomas Aquinas. On this basis, it clarifies what science is, how theoretical knowledge is classified, and why physics is a science of “material and changing things”. It then briefly presents the hylomorphic account of nature (matter, form) and three historical stages of physics linked to the development of observational instruments. The core of the text is a survey of key experiments and ideas that led to quantum theory: energy quantization (Planck, Bohr), the photoelectric effect (Einstein), wave–particle duality (de Broglie, the double-slit experiment), the probabilistic interpretation of the wave function (Born), and the Schrödinger equation. The conclusion returns to Aquinas’s ethics and metaphysics: the ordered progression of the sciences, the claim that the human good consists in knowing the truth, and the notion of “knowledge through love”, illustrated by events from Aquinas’s final years.
In the two thousand years that followed the culmination of Greek science and culture in the fifth and fourth centuries BC the human mind was to a large extent occupied with problems of a different kind from those of the early period. In the first centuries of Greek culture the strongest impulse had come from the immediate reality of the world in which we live and which we perceive by our senses. This reality was full of life and there was no good reason to stress the distinction between matter and mind or between body and soul. But in the philosophy of Plato one already sees that another reality begins to become stronger. In the famous simile of the cave Plato compares men to prisoners in a cave who are bound and can look in only one direction. They have a fire behind them and see on a wall the shadows of themselves and of objects behind them. Since they see nothing but the shadows, they regard those shadows as real and are not aware of the objects. Finally one of the prisoners escapes and comes from the cave into the light of the sun. For the first time he sees real things and realizes that he had been deceived hitherto by the shadows. For the first time he knows the truth and thinks only with sorrow of his long life in the darkness. The real philosopher is the prisoner who has escaped from the cave into the light of truth, he is the one who possesses real knowledge. These keywords were added by machine and not by the authors. This process is experimental and the keywords may be updated as the learning algorithm improves.
The old Bohr–Einstein debate about the completeness of quantum mechanics (QM) was held on an ontological ground. The completeness problem becomes more tractable, however, if it is preliminarily discussed from a semantic viewpoint. Indeed every physical theory adopts, explicitly or not, a truth theory for its observative language, in terms of which the notions of semantic objectivity and semantic completeness of the physical theory can be introduced and inquired. In particular, standard QM adopts a verificationist theory of truth that implies its semantic nonobjectivity; moreover, we show in this paper that standard QM is semantically complete, which matches Bohr’s thesis. On the other hand, one of the authors has provided a Semantic Realism (or SR) interpretation of QM that adopts a Tarskian theory of truth as correspondence for the observative language of QM (which was previously mantained to be impossible); according to this interpretation QM is semantically objective, yet incomplete, which matches EPR’s thesis. Thus, standard QM and the SR interpretation of QM come to opposite conclusions. These can be reconciled within an integrationist perspective that interpretes non–Tarskian theories of truth as theories of metalinguistic concepts different from truth.