Transcendental Physics

 

Summary of Chapter 2

 

Quantum Physics

            I have presented this chapter on Quantum Physics as a play in three acts.  The honours for act one go solely to Max Planck in his conception of the theory as a means of contending with the very bothersome contradiction of the 'ultraviolet catastrophe'.  But what he brought into being (right on the turn of the twentieth century, incidentally) was mysterious at every level, crying out for the kind of focusing that only sophisticated mathematics could supply.  And so things largely remained for a couple of decades.

            Then, largely confined to the 1930s, there was a spectacular flowering of mathematical genius, in which the needed formulations were sketched in.  These were golden years, and the names of its principle authors still echo within the halls of physics -Heisenberg, De Broglie,  Schrödinger and Dirac are those which come most readily to mind.  This period of consolidation terminated in what we would now called to Copenhagen exegesis -one which sought to explain the otherwise unaccounted-for phenomenon of 'quantum collapse' as the consequence of an act of observation -whether directly by the human eye or through the planned intrusion of recording instrumentation. I believe it to be true to say that this 'Observership Physics' survives as the default posture at the present day

            This classical viewpoint, however, created as much mystery as it dispelled.  The world to which it points is disturbingly irreal  Little of the physics of the nineteenth century remained -in terms of its essentially quotidian ontology. This was not to be solved till act three -in which the curtain was raised by John Stuart Bell, upon which the principle player -David Bohm- declaimed upon his restoration of a tangible neo-reality.  This inevitably departed from its nineteenth century counterpart, yet in ways that no longer outraged commonsense.  Particles were back in  as permanent residents rather than ghosts which departed almost before they had arrived when anyone glanced in the direction of wave functions residing within the Olympian heights of their Hilbert space. 

            It is hardly to be wondered that changing the ontological grounding of physics, as I have proposed should call for further modifications.   In a brief and halting epilogue, I took Bohm's soliloquy as my point of departure.

             Much though it runs against my principles -that of mentioning a lady's name in the officers' mess- I have to confess to a brief affair with 'quantum mind'.  There are a number of good reasons for suspecting that this might be the place at which the 'second category' of conscious had its origin and siting, but I ended up deciding it was not for me   I would credit Henry Stapp as the one who has made the best case for the notion, expanding it into an overall statement of the nature of Reality itself.  Chris Nunn conceives quantum mind in an ingenious way, calling upon the (to me) esoteric discipline of knot topology to store the information of dispositional mind.  As a huge fringe benefit, he manages the finesse the epistemological dilemma of perception by restoring 'naive' -or direct- realism, to which commonsense so ardently attests.  Finally, Gordon Globus drives home the fact that over the matter of coming to terms with a 'representational' epistemology, it raises the inner, microcosmic reconstruction of the cosmos 'outside', to higher level of offset and abstraction.  There are original minds at work here, and the reader is urged to review the matter and make up his own mind.  My treatment is explored in a companion website (on the Mind/Brain problem) currently nearing completion, but I have included the PDF in the present site.  The reader will find it at Quantum_Mind: 

            In my considered judgment, when all is said and done, Quantum Physics confronts us with a far greater departure from classical 19th century physics, even given Bohm's neorealistic exegesis, than does Relativity -when this be properly understood and interpreted.  Most of its current mystery is man made,  being the direct outcome of the dismissal of the inertial frame with consequent elevation of the Minkowski manifold from epistemic to ontic status.  It is the taking of this step which entangles space with time in a hybrid real and 'imaginary' manifold.  Carried through into the deeper waters of the general theory, it leads to the possibilities of time travel -with all of its forbidding paradoxes.  Science finds itself threatened by a Science Fiction takeover -which, unfortunately, is much to its liking.  See chapter 3    

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