The Stuff the World is Made of: Physics and Reality

Aerts, Diederik

doi:10.1007/978-94-011-4704-0_9

Cited by 46 publications

(139 citation statements)

References 49 publications

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“…As mentioned in the introduction, the notion of non-spatiality, in relation to quantum entities, has already been investigated by Aerts, in a number of publications (Aerts 1990(Aerts , 1998(Aerts , 1999 and we don't pretend here being particularly innovative in our discussion, which is just another way to present a well-known argument in what we hope is a conceptually clear and precise way.…”

Section: Non-spatialitymentioning

confidence: 94%

“…There is indeed a very well developed approach to the foundations of quantum mechanics, generally referred to as the Geneva-Brussels approach (which counts within its founders J. M. Jauch, C. Piron, D. Aerts and others; see for instance Piron 1976Piron , 1978Piron , 1990Aerts 1982Aerts , 1990Aerts , 1998Aerts , 1999Aerts , 1984Aerts , 1992aChristiaens 2002 and the references cited therein), where the notion of element of reality introduced by Einstein Podolsky and Rosen has been further developed in a very detailed and nuanced way. This has been done also with the aim of putting forward a very specific and very complete Existence Criterion, which is the following:…”

Section: Existence Criterionmentioning

confidence: 99%

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Ephemeral Properties and the Illusion of Microscopic Particles

Bianchi¹

2011

Found Sci

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Founding our analysis on the Geneva-Brussels approach to quantum mechanics, we use conventional macroscopic objects as guiding examples to clarify the content of two important results of the beginning of twentieth century: Einstein-Podolsky-Rosen's reality criterion and Heisenberg's uncertainty principle. We then use them in combination to show that our widespread belief in the existence of microscopic particles is only the result of a cognitive illusion, as microscopic particles are not particles, but are instead the ephemeral spatial and local manifestations of non-spatial and non-local entities.

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Section: Non-spatialitymentioning

confidence: 94%

Section: Existence Criterionmentioning

confidence: 99%

Ephemeral Properties and the Illusion of Microscopic Particles

Bianchi¹

2011

Found Sci

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“…For sake of completeness we mention other work that has contributed to advances in the approach that is less directly of importance for what we do in this paper, but shows how the approach is developing into other directions as well [52,53,54,55,56,57,58,59,60,61,62,63,64,65,66,67,68,69,70,71,72,73,74,75,76,77,78,79,80,81].…”

Section: How We Will Proceedmentioning

confidence: 99%

Being and Change: Foundations of a Realistic Operational Formalism

Aerts¹

2002

Probing the Structure of Quantum Mechanics

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The aim of this article is to represent the general description of an entity by means of its states, contexts and properties. The entity that we want to describe does not necessarily have to be a physical entity, but can also be an entity of a more abstract nature, for example a concept, or a cultural artifact, or the mind of a person, etc..., which means that we aim at very general description. The effect that a context has on the state of the entity plays a fundamental role, which means that our approach is intrinsically contextual. The approach is inspired by the mathematical formalisms that have been developed in axiomatic quantum mechanics, where a specific type of quantum contextuality is modelled. However, because in general states also influence contextwhich is not the case in quantum mechanics -we need a more general setting than the one used there. Our focus on context as a fundamental concept makes it possible to unify 'dynamical change' and 'change under influence of measurement', which makes our approach also more general and more powerful than the traditional quantum axiomatic approaches. For this reason an experiment (or measurement) is introduced as a specific kind of context. Mathematically we introduce a state context property system as the structure to describe an entity by means of its states, contexts and properties. We also strive from the start to a categorical setting and derive the morphisms between * Published as: D. Aerts, "Being and change: foundations of a realistic operational formalism", in Probing the Structure of Quantum Mechanics: Nonlinearity, Nonlocality, Computation and Axiomatics, eds. D. Aerts, M. Czachor and T. Durt, World Scientific, Singapore (2002). 1 state context property systems from a merological covariance principle. We introduce the category SCOP with as elements the state context property systems and as morphisms the ones that we derived from this merological covariance principle. We introduce property completeness and state completeness and study the operational foundation of the formalism.

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“…In ultimate analysis, what quantum mechanics teaches us is that not all of physical reality is contained within space, and that we need to drop the preconception that so-called microscopic "particles" and quantum "fields" would necessarily be spatial entities. [5,6,[8][9][10].…”

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confidence: 99%

Quantum fields are not fields; comment on “There are no particles, there are only fields,” by Art Hobson [Am. J. Phys. 81(3), 211–223 (2013)]

Bianchi¹

2013

American Journal of Physics

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In Ref. 1, Hobson defends the superiority of the field concept in quantum physics, in comparison to the particle concept. His view is that if we acknowledge that the fundamental constituents of physical reality are fields, and not particles, then much of the interpretational difficulties of quantum physics would disappear. However, as we shall briefly explain in the present comment, quantum fields are no more fields than quantum particles are particles, so that the replacement of a particle ontology (or particle and field ontology) by an all-field ontology, will not solve the typical quantum interpretational problems.Let us start by considering the main reason why a quantum entity cannot be considered a particle, then show that the same argument applies, mutatis mutandis, to the field concept. A particle (or corpuscle) is, by definition, a system localized in space. This means that if a physical entity is a particle then, in every moment, it must be characterizable by a specific position (for instance of its center of mass) in our three-dimensional Euclidean space. Let us call this fundamental attribute spatiality.Then, if microscopic entities are assumed to obey Heisenberg's uncertainty principle (HUP), as we know they do, one is forced to admit that the concept of "microscopic particle" is a self-contradictory one. This because if an entity obeys HUP, one cannot simultaneously determine its position and momentum and, as a consequence, one cannot determine, not even in principle, how the position of the entity will vary in time (by solving the classical equations of motion). Consequently, one cannot predict with certainty its future locations. Now, according to the reality criterion formulated by Einstein, Podolsky and Rosen [2], and further refined by Piron and Aerts [3][4][5], the notion of actual existence is intimately related to the notion of predictability, in the sense that a property can be said to be actual, for a given physical entity, if and only if should one decide to observe it (i.e., to test it), the success of the observation would be in principle predictable in advance, with certainty.According to this general reality (or existence) criterion, one must conclude that a microscopic entity obeying the HUP cannot actually possess the property of being always present somewhere in space, as there are no means to predict its spatial localizations with certainty, not even in principle. Therefore, whatever its nature is, it is a non-spatial entity, and if only for this reason it * Electronic address: autoricerca@gmail.com cannot be considered a particle [5]. But then, if quantum entities are not particles, as they are intrinsically non-spatial, what can we say about their nature? Can we affirm, as suggested by Hobson, that they are mere fields, i.e., that the wave function ψ t has to be simply interpreted as a real space-filling extended field?Our point is that this cannot be done. Indeed, although classical fields, contrary to classical particles, are spatially extended entities, spread out over space,...

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The Stuff the World is Made of: Physics and Reality

Cited by 46 publications

References 49 publications

Ephemeral Properties and the Illusion of Microscopic Particles

Ephemeral Properties and the Illusion of Microscopic Particles

Being and Change: Foundations of a Realistic Operational Formalism

Quantum fields are not fields; comment on “There are no particles, there are only fields,” by Art Hobson [Am. J. Phys. 81(3), 211–223 (2013)]

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