Abstract
At the origin of our approach lay two encounters between Greek thought and Quantum Mechanics, one of them deliberately conceived by its author, the other being a meeting between new QM-concepts and one of the oldest problems of human thinking about the world. The first encounter has been presented in a short lecture by C. Piron [74, p. 169] in which he attempted to develop a realistic QM-interpretation based on two concepts fundamental to Aristotelian metaphysics, viz. potentiality and actuality. The second one is the doctoral dissertation of D. Aerts [3]. It both by content and title dealt with the problem of the One and the Many, the central theme Plato inherited from fifth century philosopher Parmenides of Elea. In what follows we will attempt to make clear that these encounters are not of a purely coincidential nature. We intend to develop in this paper an analysis and re-evaluation of these old questions and their solutions. Our contention is that this analysis might amount into new perspectives on the interpretation of QM, since the enigmas and paradoxes of early Greek thought, and the solutions presented to them in the “classical period” are, more than we realize, bound to mark our way of looking at and reasoning about the world1. The thought instruments developed by Plato and Aristotle, in order to solve the riddles following out of so called “pre-Socratic” thought, which are epitomized in the, according to both classical thinkers apparent, contradiction between the “world views” of Heraclitus of Ephesus and Parmenides of Elea, are in use up to the present, be it in slightly modified forms2.
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Verelst, K., Coecke, B. (1999). Early Greek Thought and Perspectives for the Interpretation of Quantum Mechanics: Preliminaries to an Ontological Approach. In: Cornelis, G.C., Smets, S., Van Bendegem, J.P. (eds) Metadebates on Science. EINSTEIN MEETS MAGRITTE: An Interdisciplinary Reflection on Science, Nature, Art, Human Action and Society, vol 6. Springer, Dordrecht. https://doi.org/10.1007/978-94-017-2245-2_12
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