Abstract
Quantum phenomena show that subatomic reality does not have a classical structure. The world is not made up of particles in the sense of the traditional mereological and causal particle concept. Nature is not as “conformable to herself and simple” as Newton thought.1 In the course of the quantum revolution, the traditional metaphysical assumptions about the constituent parts of matter were refuted at the same time as the light flashes and particle tracks caused by α-rays showed that there must be subatomic particles. The quantum revolution showed that subatomic reality is not as classical physics and traditional metaphysics wanted it to be. Nevertheless, the philosophical debate about the interpretation of quantum theory focused mainly on the following options: either be agnostic about or even deny the existence of subatomic reality; or try to re-establish the metaphysical picture of a reality that comes as close as possible to the lost world of classical physics.
Newton 1730, Query 31.
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References
See Falkenburg 1993b.
See Kuhlmann et al. 2002 and Lyre 2004.
See, e.g., Perkins 2000, 166–168.
See Perkins 2000, 162–192, in particular 166–168 and 186–190; Povh et al. 1999, 107–111.
Povh et al. 1999, 111.
Perkins 2000, 190–192.
This was predicted by Scully et al. 1991 (see my discussion of the paper in Sect. 7.4.1) and tested in the experiment of Dürr et al. (see Dürr and Rempe 2000a, 55, and my discussion in Sect. 7.5).
See the remarks in Peres 1993, 12, and my discussion in Sect. 7.3.
See Hacking 1983, 22–25 and Sect. 2.4.
Hacking 1983, 266–273.
See Kant 1786, 537–542, and von Weizsäcker 1971, 383–404.
See Kant 1781/87, A 189–211/B 232-256.
Bohr 1928, 580; see note 90 of Chap. 1.
Pringe 2006. Here, the systematic relations of this approach to Bohr’s complementarity view of quantum phenomena are also investigated in detail.
Wheeler 1979–1981.
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(2007). Subatomic Reality. In: Particle Metaphysics. The Frontiers Collection. Springer, Berlin, Heidelberg. https://doi.org/10.1007/978-3-540-33732-4_8
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