Overview

This essay seeks to understand just what it is that modern science tells us about nature. For the longest time the story told by science appeared to be fully reflective of our common experience: nature was discovered as a collection of reciprocally influencing objects governed by laws which were consistent with that experience. And then, about a hundred years ago, the story suddenly became obscure. Science introduced into nature quantum objects which were supposed to look nothing like anything we had ever seen before and the laws governing them no longer appeared to make much sense to us. Thereafter, what science told us about nature was no longer quite as clear. This shift in the story is conspicuous and bespeaks of an earlier moment in the development of science when the project might have inadvertently taken a step which would eventually make her strange. In search for that fateful decision, the essay retraces the main steps that science had taken along its development from pre-modern times onward and, having found it, inquires into alternative decisions that might have been made at the time things began to change.

The search locates the decision which led to quantum strangeness within the corpuscular theory of matter and specifically identifies it as the decision to experimentally observe the constituents of matter as if they were real objects. The essay argues that there were both philosophical as well as theoretical indicators suggesting all along that those objects were probably not objectively real and recounts in some detail the reasons why those indicators went largely unheeded. It then proceeds to determine just what those constituents are if not objectively real and to specify the unique manner in which such objects are what they are. This focus on what constituents of matter are, rather than on how they constitute the inside of natural objects, classifies the essay as an investigation of the ontological side of modern science. Finally, the essay considers the alternative ontologies which could have been entertained for these objects at the time the decision was made to experimentally observe them and shows how 'skipping over' such alternatives generated the specific ways in which quantum mechanics, the theory describing the results of such experiments, had to be strange.

The need to introduce these ontologically different objects alongside those which populate our daily experience changes the meaning of science. Science does not discover the laws which objectively govern nature but rather it constructs an explanation for the observed behavior of natural objects. Its guiding principle is therefore not to accurately capture any such laws but to maintain instead the self-consistency of the explanatory structures that it creates.

Dr Alfred Kaufman graduated from New York University with a doctoral degree in theoretical high energy physics. He has worked in the field of system analysis providing technical and strategic advice to the Defense Department while maintaining an active interest in the foundations, both structural and philosophical, of modern physics.

Preface

The source of all our knowledge about nature is the personal experience we gain by manipulating the things which we encounter in it. By exchanging this our personal experience with others, we attain to a common experience. Consequently, any theorizing we may do about nature should be consistent with our common experience. It was therefore with great unease that the scientific community came to realize at the turn of the last century that the theory it had developed to describe what was inside things contradicted our common experience with those very things themselves. If the entities which we presupposed populated the inside of things were to explain our common experience with those things, they would have to be thoroughly unlike any ordinary thing we had ever encountered. Thus, to take just one example, an electron does not possess a location despite the fact that all other particles we encounter in our experience do. Instead, the theory assigns to it only a probability of being found in a given location when a measurement inquiring after its position is actually performed. Prior to such a measurement, the electron is taken to be simultaneously in all possible locations in which it could possibly be found; in essence, the electron rests, not in any given state of specified position, but rather in a superposition of all such states. Bruce Rosenblum and Fred Kuttner of the University of California have recently described all the strange features of the constituents of things in their book Quantum Enigma: Physics Encounters Consciousness.

Naturally, this difference between the theory describing the constituents of things and the universal expectation that they would be just like the things they are supposed to constitute, engendered a wide-ranging debate within the community, a debate which sought to understand how some part of our experience could be so fundamentally unlike the rest of it. Throughout that debate, all participants agreed implicitly that atomic things were part of our common experience every bit as much as stones and fluids were, but they disagreed about whether their tendency to behave in a manner counter to our common sense was merely a temporary feature of a developing theory or whether it was a fundamental feature of it. Due principally to the unquestionable success that the new theory was having in explaining all of our experience with those phenomena which were related to the inside of things, the debate subsided; there are hardly any scientists today who entertain any doubt at all about the fact that quantum theory is the appropriate representation of how things look inside.

There is however a lingering debate going on about whether the strange way in which atomic entities seem to behave should really matter to us. Most people think not; constituents of things are what they are and, as long as the theory describing them works, we should not obsess too much about their failure to conform to our common sense. The Copenhagen settlement underlying this attitude is as follows. Constituents of things are objects of experience, except that they are so small compared to all other objects of experience, that we have no direct sensory access to them. Consequently, they must be approached with an observing apparatus. Since the apparatuses used to observe them are unavoidably much larger than atomic entities, these entities are bound to be uncontrollably disturbed by the act of observation and, therefore, what we can learn about them will be correspondingly limited. It is not that they necessarily lack the familiar properties of the things which we can directly approach; it is rather that we are not able to precisely ascertain just what values those properties might have. Naturally, when the size of the observed gets to be similar with the size of the apparatus observing it, these limitations ought to be lifted. And, in fact, quantum theory which describes the constituents of things, and classical theory which describes the things which are constituted of them, do approach each other when the size difference can be ignored.

But there is a dissenting view which is enabled by the very terms of the Copenhagen settlement itself. According to that settlement, while we cannot directly encounter the constituents of things, looking at atomic entities with an observing apparatus is as legitimate a way to experience them as it would have been encountering them with our senses. The dissenting view rejects this alternative way to experience. It asserts that we cannot become familiar with the constituents of things by any other means than direct encounter with them because using intermediary apparatuses to observe them always leaves us on the horns of a dilemma: are we seeing a real constituent through the apparatus or are we explaining the functioning of the observing apparatus by means of that constituent. On this view, therefore, we lack any experiential foundation for asserting that they are in fact objects of our experience. Of course, we may always simply suppose the constituents of things to be real, but then we are hardly justified in taking concrete steps to observe such a hypothetical entity as if it were a real thing.

Consequently, the notion that things in our common experience are thus possessed of two different manners of behaviour—one which is consistent with our common sense and one which is not—rests on a questionable foundation. In fact, to say that atomic entities are objects of experience is a mischaracterization: they are not objects of experience which, because of their small size, are not directly accessible to us; rather, they are not accessible to us at all because they are not objects of experience. On this dissenting view, quantum mechanics is not a description of how the objects inside things behave because they are not given to us to describe; rather, it is a conceptual structure axiomatically constructed by man in order to explain those phenomena which, like chemical, caloric, and optical phenomena, he naturally attributes to the inside of ordinary things. Modern science is not descriptive but axiomatic.

The axiomatic construct which modern science uses to explain these phenomena employs certain entities—such as molecules, atoms, electrons, protons, and so on—to imagine what is inside the things engaged in them. But what and how those entities are is not simply given to us from experience; what they are should rather be dictated by what the explanatory process requires of them. They are not objects of experience but objects of explanation. Identifying the ontological difference between these two objects requires that we focus attention on the manner in which the latter are what they are. This essay was written to address this issue. It explores the ontological character which quantum theory requires for its explanatory objects and contrasts it with the ontology of the objects we encounter in our daily activities.

The difference between them reflects the fact that the latter is given to us while the former is not. An object of explanation is not something we can simply find lying around like some piece of rock; if we wish to observe it, therefore, we must first give to ourselves by manufacturing it. Since we are not some God-like creature able to create things by fiat, and because the raison d'être of an object of explanation is to explain, this manufacturing process must somehow or other refer back to the explanation which was originally provided by the object we wish to manufacture. The simplest conception would be to incorporate into our observational set-up a re-creation of the experiential set-up which was previously explained by the object we are trying to manufacture. If, for instance, J.J. Thomson successfully explained what happens when we apply an electric potential between two pieces of metal located inside a vacuumed glass bottle by saying that electrons, emitted from the cathode travel towards the anode, then we are naturally inclined to also say that an electron gun, which after all is nothing but a replica of this neon-light-like set-up, is a generator of electrons; we can therefore use an electron gun to manufacture electrons.

This need for giving an object of explanation to ourselves by manufacturing it, is determinative of its ontology just as much as the reality we assign to an object of experience is determined by it being something given to us to encounter. The essay explores how this need determines the specific manner in which an object of explanation is what it is. This exploratory effort was helped by locating ourselves at the time when fundamental science questions were first asked rather than at the much later time when the answers were already well settled in. For at such later time, the incentive in the literature is to clarify and support the accepted answers with arguments and experimental evidence, while at the beginning other alternative answers were still possible. Consequently, we described the development of quantum mechanics not as the customary triumphal march of discovery recounted in standard historical texts, but rather as the thorny way of accommodation to the epistemological position that the scientific community had imposed upon itself when it decided that atomic entities were real but unapproachable.

Our analytic journey through modern science will lead us to an understanding which illuminates the reasons why quantum mechanics had to become the extremely successful but exceedingly strange theory that it is. The intrinsically probabilistic character of an atomic entity, for instance, as well as the attendant superposition of its states, is then a consequence of the theory having to consistently account for both the manufacturing and the observational set-ups which together constitute the act of observing a constituent of things.

Dr Alfred Kaufman
Falls Church
Virginia
2016

Table of contents

A.	THE PURPOSE OF THIS ESSAY	1
B.	THE CORPUSCULAR THEORY OF MATTER	7
B.1	The Inside of Things	7
B.2	Gas Law and the Molecule	8
B.3	Chemistry and the Atom	10
B.4	Conduction of Electricity through Rarefied Gases and the Electron	11
B.5	A Gathering Storm of Failure	12
B.5.1	The First Failure: Black Body Radiation	14
B.5.2	The Second Failure: Atomic Spectra	20
B.5.3	The Third Failure: The Photoelectric Effect	21
C.	THE CREATION OF QUANTUM MECHANICS	23
C.1	Early Attempts to Deal with the Failures of the Corpuscular Theory	23
C.1.1	An Act of Desperation: The Quantum Object Announces Itself	23
C.1.2	The Act of Desperation Pays Off:  Quantum Objects Show Surprising Power to Explain	26
C.1.3	Observing a Quantum Object: The Davisson-Germer Experiment	29
C.2	A New Theory is Wrought from the Crisis	32
C.3	The Calculational Instruction Book of the Theory	36
C.4	Entanglement and the EPR paper	42
C.5	The Ontological Question: What, After All, is an Electron?	43
D.	SEARCHING FOR THE BEING OF THE CONSTITUENTS OF MATTER	47
D.1	Using the Things Which are Given to Us	49
D.2	Contemplating the Things Which are Given to Us	52
D.3	Explaining the Contemplated World: The How and the Why Explanations	53
D.4	The Historical Character of Explanation	55
D.5	Objects of Explanation	62
D.6	Are Objects of Explanation Objects of Experience?	67
D.6.1	How Corpuscular Theory Explained Boyle’s Law	68
D.6.2	How Electromagnetic Theory Explained Light	72
D.7	Observing an Object of Explanation	76
D.8	Taxonomy of Scientific Measurements	78
D.9	The Being of an Object of Explanation as Revealed in a Predicated Measurement	80
D.9.1	Reference to Explanation	81
D.9.2	Persistency Through Modification	82
D.9.3	Retaining Previous Modifications	83
D.9.4	Was Aristotle Right After All?	84
D.10	The Being of an Object of Explanation when Used to Explain an Ordinary Measurement	86
E.	THE ONTOLOGICAL CONTENT OF QUANTUM MECHANICS	93
E.1	Jumping Over Ontology: The Copenhagen Settlement	94
E.2	The Resulting Strangeness of Quantum Mechanics	98
E.2.1	Bohr’s Complementarity Principle	100
E.2.2	Planck’s Radiation Formula	101
E.2.3	Ontological Probabilities	104
E.2.4	Quantum Superposition of States	105
E.2.5	Quantum Entanglement	109
E.3	The Accuracy of Quantum Mechanics	112
F.	REFLECTIONS UPON THE STRUCTURE OF THE SCIENTIFIC PROJECT	117
F.1	The Structure of Modern Science	117
F.2	Reflections upon the Structure of Modern Science	121
F.2.1	Are Objects of Explanation Real?	122
F.2.2	Exiled from Science, Where Did Man Go?	124
F.2.3	How Much Truth is there in Modern Scientific Theories?	128
	BIBLIOGRAPHY	131

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