A Question From A Reader

One of The Readers of

"volition" as one of the "roots" of the concept "proof",
posted here on Thursday, January 5, 2006, Asks:

How does one (or, does one?) reach a 'that makes sense' level
dealing with Quantum Mechanics?
****************************************************
From Tom Miovas:

Unfortunately, many aspects of modern quantum mechanics are
not readily reducible to the perceptually self-evident, primarily
because many of its concepts are not grounded in reality by the
physicists who practice it -- and I say this as a physics and
philosophy major. In fact, many of the current quantum
physicists actually take glee in the fact that "it just doesn't
make sense," and you can hear them say this on popular science
shows. I'm not against the idea of quantization, but the way it
is represented in both physics class and popular science shows
leaves understanding to be desired. Physics, more than any other
actual science these days, needs a good philosophic washing.

However, some of the key concepts of quantization can be
reduced to the perceptually self-evident, and some of this was actually
done thousands of years ago by the Ancient Greeks. One of those
philosopher-physicists was Democritus, who came up with the
theory of atoms (yes, over two thousand years ago!).

While cutting up an apple one day, he realized that the apple
could be cut up into smaller and smaller pieces, and he wondered
just how small of a piece of apple one could get. Since the
rational Ancient Greek philosophers knew that the universe was
finite (something specific in *all* respects, existence is
identity to quote Ayn Rand), they also knew that there was no
such thing as the infinite or the infinitesimal. In other words,
one would have to reach a point at which one had the smallest
piece of apple that was possible -- it couldn't be made of an
infinite number of pieces because the apple is something finite
and specific.

Democritus called these smallest bits "atomos," which is where
we get the modern word "atom." So, if one starts cutting up an
apple, one can perceive that the bits get smaller and smaller,
and applying further reasoning, conclude that at some point one
will have the smallest bit of apple. Of course, we can't see
atoms, because they are so small, but this is one way of
grounding the idea of quantization of matter to the self-evident.

Where quantum mechanics seems to get weird is the idea that
energy, as well as matter, is quantized. But using the same
reasoning as Democritus, one can also conclude that there might
be a smallest distance one can travel or a smallest energy one
can exert. In fact, some of those same Ancient Greeks (possibly
Aristotle) gave that as an answer to Xeno's paradox.

Xeno's paradox has to do with moving in a straight line from one
position to another, always moving only half the distance
remaining. In other words, let's say one wanted to move from
point A to point B, which are twelve feet apart. The first move
is six feet, the second move is three feet, the third move is
one and a half feet, and so on. The question was: Would one
ever reach point B?

Relying on the idea of there being no infinitesimal anything and
no infinite amount of anything, one would have to conclude that
at some point of moving there would be a smallest distance one
could travel -- thus the last distance from point A to point B
would be covered in one leap at the end, so to speak.

And if one translates moving into a conceptualization of energy
(something acting or changing), then one can go from that idea
to the idea that at some point there is a smallest energy that
one could exert -- the universe cannot be comprised of either an
infinite amount of matter nor an infinite amount of possible
acting or changing (energy). In other words, at that
next-to-the-last point before taking that last smallest
movement, the energy required to move that smallest distance
would require some finite small amount of energy imparted to the
thing moving from point A to point B.

There are other aspects of quantum mechanics that I won't go
into here, but basically some of the physicists conclusions do
make sense, if one realizes that we live in a finite universe.

© 2006, T. Miovas
http://www.home.earthlink.net/~philosophic-essays/